as in exploited
to control or take advantage of by artful, unfair, or insidious means
played upon the customer's vanity to convince her to buy the expensive makeup kit
Synonyms & Similar Words
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Example Sentences
Recent Examples of Synonyms for played (upon)
Verb
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Barcelona used a mix of zonal and man-marking but struggled when teams exploited their comparalative lack of height and physicality by using players in motion.—
Anantaajith Raghuraman,
New York Times,
25 Oct. 2025 -
Inter-agent trust — the tendency for an AI agent to trust other AI agents by default — can also be exploited to get around the guardrails built into popular systems.—
Big Think,
Big Think,
24 Oct. 2025
Verb
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Even among some voters who were sincerely uncomfortable with Mamdani’s past rhetoric, many rationalized that an authentic Democrat with a pulse was still better than someone who might be manipulated from afar.—
Philip Elliott,
Time,
5 Nov. 2025
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Experts said those markets are at risk of being manipulated by foreign influence.—
Kate Plummer,
MSNBC Newsweek,
4 Nov. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Played (upon).” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/played%20%28upon%29. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
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