complicity
Americannoun
-
complicities
plural
noun
-
the fact or condition of being an accomplice, esp in a criminal act
-
a less common word for complexity
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of complicity
1650–60; < Late Latin complic-, stem of complex complice + -ity
Explanation
Complicity is involvement in a wrongful act — like when you drove your newly-turned-vegetarian friend to a fast food joint so that she could scarf down a hamburger. Complicity refers to the act of helping someone else behave inappropriately or illegally. If you find yourself accused of complicity, it's often helpful to show that you were unaware of the other person's intentions. In the case of the trip to the fast food restaurant, that's going to be hard to prove. You'll probably be scorned for being an accomplice, or someone who is complicit, in your friend's shameful act.
Vocabulary lists containing complicity
Animal Farm
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The Things They Carried
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Boots on the Ground: America's War in Vietnam
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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.
See Examples For:
Yes, we all have some level of complicity in the world’s eventual end.
From Salon ● Oct. 5, 2026
As such it comes off like a cheat, a deliberately soulless portrait that rejects our sympathies from the start, foreclosing the feelings of complication and complicity a more interesting movie might have generated.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 24, 2026
Audiences expecting an easy villain and a clear case of right and wrong will be surprised as the narrative unfolds with an examination of community, complicity and corruption within institutions of power.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 11, 2026
Yet, within Ghana itself, the conversation around African complicity is far more nuanced, and for some traditional leaders, acknowledging the past is a vital prerequisite part of healing.
From BBC ● Aug. 16, 2026
‘Mama, you have to help Amanda,” Jaime pleaded, with the certainty that came from their complicity in matters such as this.
From "The House of the Spirits: A Novel" by Isabel Allende
When it is shorn from the past that has molded its character—the countless connections and complicities that become ever more entwined over generations—a community is deprived of a future.
From Slate ● May 25, 2021
Our traumas and lapsed memories, our silences or complicities, as compared to the current youth culture, to find confirmation that we have evolved.
From New York Times ● Sep. 27, 2018
It renounces the audience's complicities when it needs them most.
From Time Magazine Archive
What Price suggests is that anyone, bound up in the tangled complicities of corrupting power, may become an interrogator.
From Time Magazine Archive
A single power can rise and, above feudal complicities, above earthly interest, avenge the oppressed and the weak.
From Là-bas by Keene Wallace
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.
