Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To plan together secretly to commit an illegal or wrongful act or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.
  • intransitive verb To join or act together; combine.
  • intransitive verb To plan or plot secretly.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Literally, to breathe together (with); breathe in unison or accord, as in singing.
  • To agree by oath, covenant, or otherwise to commit a reprehensible or illegal act; engage in a conspiracy; plot; especially, hatch treason.
  • Figuratively, to concur to one end; act in unison; contribute jointly to a certain result: as, all things conspired to make him prosperous.
  • Synonyms To intrigue. To combine, concur, unite, cooperate.
  • To plot; plan; devise; contrive; scheme for.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To plot; to plan; to combine for.
  • intransitive verb To make an agreement, esp. a secret agreement, to do some act, as to commit treason or a crime, or to do some unlawful deed; to plot together.
  • intransitive verb To concur to one end; to agree.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb To secretly plot or make plans together, often used regarding something bad or illegal.
  • verb intransitive To agree, to concur to one end.
  • verb To try to bring about.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb engage in plotting or enter into a conspiracy, swear together
  • verb act in unison or agreement and in secret towards a deceitful or illegal purpose

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English conspiren, from Old French, from Latin cōnspīrāre : com-, com- + spīrāre, to breathe.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin conspirare, conspīrō, from con-, combining form of cum ("with") + spīrō ("breathe")

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Examples

Comments

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  • to breathe together. I have always loved that.

    June 20, 2007

  • perhaps we could conspire to wordie a new word--I am getting tired of seeing the same "most wordied" words. Any suggesstions? How about some innocuous groupthink

    June 20, 2007

  • Wait a while--sooner or later, the dreaded schadenfreude will once again rear its ugly head.

    June 20, 2007

  • Let's... all... add...

    ...

    proctologist

    *snicker*

    June 20, 2007

  • I knew who made that suggestion as soon as I saw it on the comment feed. How about a word that's fun to say? Something slightly out of the ordinary, like foible. The masses will never give up trying to impress us with their command of the English language.

    June 20, 2007

  • I guess I asked for that, uselessness. It is interesting that nobody has listed proctologist yet. Perhaps we could see how often we could use the word without lising it. Sort of a non-Wordie.

    Now foible, I like that word, especially since I have such a bountiful supply.

    June 20, 2007

  • Well if y'all don't like my suggestion, you can just... choose something else then. :-)

    Though I'd argue that proctologist is a heckuva lot of fun to say.

    June 20, 2007

  • Eek. Proctologist. Every time I hear that word, I think of a woman I knew (yes, a woman) who had to see such a specialist and kept referring to him as "my proctologist." So naturally (well, naturally for the group of people in question), we started singing the Knack's "My Sharona"--replacing Sharona with proctologist--every time she said it.

    Lyrically and in so many other ways, it didn't work....

    June 20, 2007

  • Okay, so not proctologist. But seriously, we should all pick a (currently unlisted) word and bring it up to the top if we can. It'll be a fun experiment. And then delete all our comments here so nobody knows why the heck that word is mysteriously so popular.

    June 21, 2007

  • Are you suggesting we toy with the minds of other Wordies? Isn't that a little cruel? ;-) And is it coincidence that you're bringing this up on the conspire page, I wonder? Hmm....

    June 21, 2007

  • Yes, I feel a little sheepish about starting this. It was an unconsidered comment. One should not try to mess with the schadenfreude. I think I will go add control freak to my list of words.

    June 21, 2007

  • Oh no! Please don't feel bad--this is downright fun! My comments are purely in jest, slumry. I think it would be fun to add new words and see what floats to the top of the home page.

    And please, by all means, mess with the schadenfreude! ;-)

    June 21, 2007

  • I'm not convinced that there are enough of us (active commenting "core Wordies") to faze the schadenfreude juggernaut. But it's still worth a try.

    And I'm pretty sure this site was made for toying with people's minds.

    June 21, 2007

  • I agree. It has certainly toyed with mine!

    June 21, 2007

  • A vampire known for tricking prisoners out of their blood cells.

    March 25, 2009