to conspire to assassinate
1
9.9
- phrasal verb
- /kənˈspaɪər tə əˈsæsɪˌneɪt/
- Offensive
:
conspirar para asesinar
- Recently, an official at the U.S. Department of State said that Washington was ready to pressure the UN Security Council to impose economic sanctions against Sudan unless Khartoum turned over to Ethiopia three Egyptians accused of conspiring to assassinate the Egyptian president.
- conspired to assassinate Kennedy
- conspiring to assassinate the president
Examples
-
Queen Mary was charged with treason for allegedly conspiring to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I.
-
Two years earlier, Saddam Hussein had conspired to assassinate Kassim.
Academic text (1991) -
Compounding problems, in October the regime passed its controversial income tax and further alienated Guatemala's coffee oligarchy, which responded by conspiring to assassinate the president.
Academic text (2001) -
Essex had been arrested three weeks earlier and charged with high treason for conspiring to assassinate King Charles II.
-
In interviews, Sadat publicly alleged that the Egyptian military had conspired to assassinate President Sadat in 1981.
Synonyms
120
4.8
To make a secret plan to do something illegal
19
8.8
Secretly allow or help someone to do something wrong
14
6.5
To make secret plans to do something dishonest
8
8.0
Someone who secretly plans to do something dishonest or harmful
1
9.9
To make secret plans to do something bad
To plan secretly with others to do something illegal
To meet secretly to plan something dishonest
To plot secretly to gain power, often in politics
To form a secret group to plot against someone
Antonyms
How Violent
- NSFW
199
7.0
- Offensive
1
9.9
120
4.8
987
3.3
Surface Forms
Morphology
conspire + to + assassinate
Both key verbs are semantically transparent: 'conspire' means to secretly plan harmful activities together and 'assassinate' means to murder an important person, so a learner who knows those words can directly infer 'to secretly plan to murder a prominent person.' The word 'to' is merely the infinitival marker and the construction parallels patterns in many languages, supporting straightforward compositional interpretation for B1 learners.
Etymology
The phrase conspire to assassinate comes from a vivid image: conspire once meant people 'breathing together', close and whispering, and assassinate comes from old words for secret killers. Together they paint a picture of people quietly planning a murder, so the phrase means 'to secretly plan together to kill'.