Extort
adj, verb ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 To take or seize from an unwilling person by physical force, menace, duress, torture, or any undue or illegal exercise of power or ingenuity. transitive
"to extort contributions from the vanquished"
- 2 get or cause to become in a difficult or laborious manner wordnet
- 3 To obtain by means of the offense of extortion. transitive
"Weirdly, Renton doesn’t look too much older and the same also goes for Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), who has exchanged heroin for cocaine and nowadays runs an escort-and-blackmail business, secretly videoing clients and extorting money, working with his female business partner, Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova)."
- 4 obtain by coercion or intimidation wordnet
- 5 To twist outwards. intransitive, transitive
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- 6 obtain through intimidation wordnet
- 1 extorted; obtained by extortion. not-comparable, obsolete
"Hauing great Lordships got and goodly farmes, Through strong oppression of his powre extort."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"That’s why we’ve pushed for transparency and cooperation in rooting out corruption, and tracking illicit dollars, because markets create more jobs when they're fueled by hard work, and not the capacity to extort a bribe."
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin extortus, past participle of extorquere (“to twist or wrench out, to extort”); from ex (“out”) + -tort, from torqueō (“twist, turn”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.