as in exploits
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 plays (upon)
Verb
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King's 1986 horror novel told the story of seven children terrorized by an evil entity called It, which exploits its victims using their own fears.—
Virginia Chamlee,
PEOPLE,
29 Jan. 2026 -
Fractal compression exploits this principle directly, representing images as systems of iterated functions rather than grids of pixels.—
Amir Husain,
Forbes.com,
29 Jan. 2026
Verb
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Throughout the process, the robot simultaneously navigates, avoids obstacles, and manipulates objects without human guidance.—
Atharva Gosavi,
Interesting Engineering,
3 Feb. 2026
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Memory safety issues occur when software accesses or manipulates memory in an unintended way.—
IEEE Spectrum,
IEEE Spectrum,
28 Jan. 2026
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“Plays (upon).” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/plays%20%28upon%29. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.
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