complicity
Americannoun
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:
Some have questioned the historical accuracy of reports into the level of the Church's complicity, while others have raised legal concerns about it and ideological objections.
From BBC ● Jul. 30, 2026
But to say they choose to live on the street, as Pratt has, is to miss the point, to excuse our own complicity, to overlook historic policy failures, and to choose contempt over compassion.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 6, 2026
The pope in “Magnifica Humanitas” also asks for “pardon”—from whom it’s unclear—for the church’s complicity in the slave trade and other forms of exploitation.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 27, 2026
What if we could avoid our taxpayer’s complicity, without forgoing the benefits of a common tax system?
From Slate ● May 11, 2026
Kiowa, after all, had been a close friend, and for years I’ve avoided thinking about his death and my own complicity in it.
From "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien
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
What Price suggests is that anyone, bound up in the tangled complicities of corrupting power, may become an interrogator.
From Time Magazine Archive
The coincidence of alleged complicities recalls the farther shores of Jim Garrison's New Orleans fantasies.
From Time Magazine Archive
Well, she knew now—knew weaknesses and strengths she had not dreamed of, and the deep discord and still deeper complicities between what thought in her and what blindly wanted...
From The Reef by Wharton, Edith
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.
