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convict

verbnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkɒnvɪkt//
  • United States//ˈkɑnvɪkt//
  • //kənˈvɪkt//

To find guilty, as a result of legal proceedings, or (informal) in a moral sense.

verb

  1. 1

    To find guilty, as a result of legal proceedings, or (informal) in a moral sense.

    He was a convicted felon.

    His remarks convicted him of a lack of sensitivity.

    And his subjects wrung all they could wring / Out of temple and palace and store. / But when there seemed no more to bring, / His captors convicted the king / Of once having started a war, / And strangled the wretch with a string.

  2. 2

    To convince, persuade; to cause (someone) to believe in (something).

Etymology

From Middle English convicten, from Anglo-Norman convicter, from Latin convictus, the past participle of convincō (“to convict”). Doublet of convince. Displaced native Old English forwyrċan (“to convict, condemn”).

noun

  1. 1

    A person convicted of a crime by a judicial body.

  2. 2

    A person deported to a penal colony.

  3. 3

    The convict cichlid (Amatitlania nigrofasciata), also known as the zebra cichlid, a popular aquarium fish, with stripes that resemble a prison uniform.

  4. 4

    A common name for the sheepshead (Archosargus probatocephalus), owing to its black and gray stripes.

Forms

plural
convicts
past tense
convicted
past participle
convicted
present participle
convicting
third person singular
convicts
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).