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deceive

verbcommon in dialogue

  • //dɪˈsiːv//

To trick or mislead.

verb

  1. 1

    To trick or mislead.

    It feels painful to begin seeing clearly, that you’ve been deceived by the very people and institutions you trusted to guide you.

    I know—for Death, who comes for me From regions of the blest afar, Where there is nothing to deceive, Hath left his iron gate ajar, […]

    Hungry for fame and the approval of rare-animal collector Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton), Darwin deceives the Captain and his crew into believing they can get enough booty to win the pirate competition by entering Polly in a science fair. So the pirates journey to London in cheerful, blinkered defiance of the Queen, a hotheaded schemer whose royal crest reads simply “I hate pirates.”

Etymology

From Middle English deceyven, from Anglo-Norman deceivre, from Latin dēcipiō (“to deceive; beguile; entrap”), from dē- (“from”) + capiō (“to seize”); see captive. Compare conceive, perceive, receive. Displaced native Old English beswīcan.

Forms

past tense
deceived
past participle
deceived
present participle
deceiving
third person singular
deceives
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).