Word of the Day:

“Last month Ferrari lofted its banners over a resort near the southern port of Cagliari and invited journalists to test-drive the new Ferrari Roma Spider, taking advantage of the excellent tarmac, ideal weather and complaisant authorities.” — Dan Neil, The Wall Street Journal, 5 Oct. 2023

More example sentences

Complaisant and complacent are often confused, and for good reason. Not only do the words look and sound alike, but they also both come from Latin verb complacēre, meaning “to please greatly.” (The placēre in complacēre is an ancestor of the English word please). Complacent is used disapprovingly to describe someone who is self-satisfied or unconcerned with whatever is going on, but it also shares with complaisant the sense of “inclined to please or oblige.” This sense of complacent is an old one, but that hasn’t kept language critics from labeling its use as an error—and on the whole, modern writers do prefer complaisant for this meaning. Whether you complaisantly oblige, well, that’s up to you.