adj, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb

1. 1
   simple past and past participle of contrive form-of, participle, past

Adjective

1. 1
   Created in a deliberate, rather than natural or spontaneous, way.

   "contrived joke"

2. 2
   Unnatural, forced; artificial, or unrealistic.

Adjective

1. 1
   artificially formal wordnet
2. 2
   showing effects of planning or manipulation wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms

affectedarrangedartificialartificiouscalculateddesigned

Antonyms

All antonyms

spontaneous

Example

More examples

"It is certain that Emmet contrived his 'dyad' style to facilitate the process of architectural design."

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.