Conspiracies

How to spell conspiracies

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce conspiracies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does conspiracies mean?

1. nounSecret plans by two or more people to do something unlawful or harmful, or the plots themselves.

Conspiracies in a sentence

• The historian wrote a book about the political conspiracies that toppled the regime.

• Investigators uncovered several conspiracies involving bribery and fraud.

Where does conspiracies come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb conspirare, which literally meant 'to breathe together', formed from con- 'together' and spirare 'to breathe'. The vivid image was of people in such close agreement that they seemed to share a single breath, which softened into the sense of acting in harmony and then hardened into the darker sense of secretly agreeing to do something unlawful. The noun conspiratio passed into Old French as conspiracie and entered English in the late 1300s, already carrying the meaning of a plot hatched by several people. The same spirare root breathes through a whole family of English words, including inspire, expire, perspire, and respiratory, all of which still touch on breath in some way. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle, where the second 'i' in spir-A-cies is easy to lose and the soft 'c' before the ending is pronounced like an 's', tempting writers toward 'conspiracys' or 'conspirasies'.

How the word is built

• con- (together)
• spir (from spirare: to breathe)
• -acy (noun-forming suffix)
• -ies (plural)