artifice
Americannoun
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a clever trick or stratagem; a cunning, crafty device or expedient; wile.
- Synonyms:
- subterfuge
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trickery; guile; craftiness.
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cunning; ingenuity; inventiveness.
a drawing-room comedy crafted with artifice and elegance.
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a skillful or artful contrivance or expedient.
noun
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a clever expedient; ingenious stratagem
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crafty or subtle deception
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skill; cleverness
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a skilfully contrived device
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obsolete craftsmanship
Related Words
Etymology
Origin of artifice
1525–35; < Anglo-French < Latin artificium craftsmanship, art, craftiness, equivalent to arti-, combining form of ars art 1 + -fic-, combining form of facere to do 1, make + -ium + -ium
Explanation
If a politician pretends to be angry as a way of rousing the anger of the voters and getting more votes, he's guilty of artifice — a subtle and crafty trick. Before taking on its current meaning, artifice meant a skilled piece of workmanship. A beautiful diamond bracelet might have been considered a piece of artifice, for example; now it would only be called artifice if the diamonds were fake.
Vocabulary lists containing artifice
100 SAT Words Beginning with "A"
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The Federalist Papers, No. 1 by Alexander Hamilton
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Divergent
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
She called the work Museum of Artifice - and it was a nod to Ethiopia's famous rock-hewn churches in Lalibela as well as the remote northern village of Dallol.
From BBC • Mar. 24, 2024
Artifice, he contends, is cinema’s glory, “not the ridiculously false sense of realism.”
From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 6, 2022
Artifice was not just absent from her online persona; it was something she feared and actively avoided.
From The Guardian • Oct. 21, 2019
The second monitoring process, to be led by John Hanson of Artifice Forensic Financial Services, would be smaller in reach, less staff-intensive and less comprehensive than Thompson’s, the paper said.
From Reuters • Sep. 2, 2019
Artifice and not nature alone can produce this, and artifice is too costly a thing for the woman who is her own gardener, even if otherwise desirable.
From The Garden, You, and I by Wright, Mabel Osgood
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
