contrive

How to use contrive in a sentence. Example sentences and definitions for contrive.

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Editorial note

The purpose of reality TV is to contrive conflict for the sake of an audience.

Examples16

Definitions3

Parts of speech1

Quick take

make or work out a plan for; devise; "They contrived to murder their boss"; "design a new sales strategy"; "plan an attack"

Meaning at a glance

The clearest senses and uses of contrive gathered in one view.

verb

make or work out a plan for; devise; "They contrived to murder their boss"; "design a new sales strategy"; "plan an attack"

verb

come up with (an idea, plan, explanation, theory, or principle) after a mental effort; "excogitate a way to measure the speed of light"

verb

put or send forth; "She threw the flashlight beam into the corner"; "The setting sun threw long shadows"; "cast a spell"; "cast a warm light"

Definitions

Core meanings and parts of speech for contrive.

verb

make or work out a plan for; devise; "They contrived to murder their boss"; "design a new sales strategy"; "plan an attack"

verb

come up with (an idea, plan, explanation, theory, or principle) after a mental effort; "excogitate a way to measure the speed of light"

See also: invent, devise, excogitate, formulate, forge

verb

put or send forth; "She threw the flashlight beam into the corner"; "The setting sun threw long shadows"; "cast a spell"; "cast a warm light"

Example sentences

The purpose of reality TV is to contrive conflict for the sake of an audience.

To a large part, when things have to happen, somehow circumstances contrive you to accomplish it.

Must every electronic artist whose medium is `tape' be forced to contrive a live show or take up DJing if they want to eat?

You're saying the rights of a suspect go out the window when we can contrive a situation where you think other people's rights are more important?

I suspect it does: even if you can contrive a few exploits, they could still be less prevalent/practical than the weaknesses of the traditional system.

We could contrive scenarios where bcrypt with this multisource-salt would be a win over bcrypt with a single same-database salt.

Can we contrive esoteric situations where this feature would fail spectacularly?

If someone knows of this then they could contrive to have you visit a web page with some embedded resource such as an inline image that causes you to hit that url from your browser.

I'm really not keen on APIs that contrive natural actions into creating encapsulated resources.

The fact that I am aware of my thoughts is to me more valid evidence of free will than all the logical machinations that someone can contrive to support the opposite.

Just because you can use the complexity of C++'s full rule set to contrive vexing and ambiguous trivia, doesn't mean it's necessarily important to know all of it.

We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.

Where the operation of compiling might fail, I would contrive scripts, functions, routines, and other parameter driven processes of marvellous efficacy and not in common use.

It reflects their parents' view of the world as a place where wealth increases inexorably and is handed out most freely to the individuals who, via self-regard and self-assertion, contrive to appear to deserve it most.

In Internet argument fashion, a bunch of people will just jump all over you, and take your words through every useless permutation of meaning they can think of, for which they can contrive a shallowly plausible counterargument.

Dictators can fly around the world with impunity but they'll contrive to ground the plane of a democratically elected president and search it, for some guy who published a bunch of powerpoint presentations?And they did all this... with all the consequences it's going to have and they didn't even get Snowden!