Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To devise (a plot).
- v. To engage in plotting.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To plan, contrive, or form, as a plot or scheme: as, to machinate mischief.
- To lay plots or schemes.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To plan; to contrive; esp., to form a scheme with the purpose of doing harm; to contrive artfully; to plot.
- v. To contrive, as a plot; to plot.
WordNet 3.0
- v. arrange by systematic planning and united effort
- v. engage in plotting or enter into a conspiracy, swear together
Etymologies
- Latin māchinārī, māchināt-, to design, contrive, from māchina, device; see machine.
Examples
“ Here, I had no buddies to carp with, no enemies to machinate against, only a father who never liked me, and now, didn't even know me.”
“Our tax dollars pay for people to sit in a room and machinate about all the likely next horrible things that could happen.”
““No,” I said, closing my eyes and trying to machinate as Honey-ishly as possible.”
“Are you all missing the good old days when you could machinate and obfuscate all day long about Mann, the Hockey team and statistical felonies they committed?”
“As he lay gathering strength to sit up in bed, which treat had been promised him in ten days, Aladdin's mind worked hard over the future, and what he could machinate in order one day to be almost worthy to kiss the dust under Margaret's feet.”
“He would machinate with really considerable energy, and repair to a certain gallery high above the street of moving ways, from which he could view the entrance to the barrack of the Labour Company in the ward which sheltered Denton and Elizabeth.”
“He neither wished for war, nor dared he machinate for it; but with all his democratic soul he loved the cause which was convulsing the world from its ferocious centre in France.”
“Good apes begat good apes, and at last when human intelligence stole like a late spring upon the mimicry of our semi - simious ancestry, the creature learnt how he could, of his own forethought, add extra-corporaneous limbs to the members of his body and become not only a vertebrate mammal, but a vertebrate machinate mammal into the bargain.”
“This event revived the hopes of the sect, who once more began to machinate against Michelangelo.”
“But we leave the beauteous Kate and her mischief-loving maiden, to plot and machinate against the unsuspecting lover.”
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