conspire
verb
Simple meaning
To secretly plot or make plans together, often with the intention to bring bad or illegal results.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
kuhnspyerSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
kənsˈpaɪɚ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
verb
intransitive
To secretly plot or make plans together, often with the intention to bring bad or illegal results; to collude, to connive, to plot.
transitive
To work together to bring about.
intransitive
To agree, to concur to one end.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C2 · Proficient (estimated)
- Frequency
- Rare
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: To secretly plot or make plans together, often with the intention to bring bad or illegal results; to collude, to connive, to plot.
Used this way, conspire is a specialist word with a faintly unfavourable edge. It turns up most in technical or specialist writing contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Slightly negative
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Critical or judgemental
- Usage feel
- Clinical and detached
Where it naturally appears
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use conspire
- “The two companies conspired to cause the value of the stock to fall.”verb
- “They conspired to overthrow the government.”verb
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Common Patterns and Combinations
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.