as in exploiting
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
Relevance
Example Sentences
Recent Examples of Synonyms for playing (upon)
Verb
-
Abusers and traffickers are exploiting this lack of oversight—leaving women coerced, deceived, and sometimes poisoned.—
Christa Brown,
MSNBC Newsweek,
1 Sep. 2025 -
Today’s adversaries move at machine speed, automating reconnaissance and exploiting exposures within hours of disclosure.—
Tony Bradley,
Forbes.com,
30 Aug. 2025
Verb
-
Was Prater manipulating evidence?—
Clayton Davis,
Variety,
5 Sep. 2025
-
One was based on hard-coding logical rules for categorizing inputs into symbols and then for manipulating those symbols to arrive at outputs.—
Jeremy Kahn,
Fortune,
3 Sep. 2025
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to
show current usage.
Read More
Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.
Send us feedback.
Cite this Entry
“Playing (upon).” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/playing%20%28upon%29. Accessed 9 Sep. 2025.
Copy CitationLove words? Need even more definitions?
Merriam-Webster unabridged
Share