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Definition of "feign" []

  • To give a false appearance of: feign sleep. (verb-transitive)
  • To represent falsely; pretend to: feign authorship of a novel. (verb-transitive)
  • To imitate so as to deceive: feign another's voice. (verb-transitive)
  • To fabricate: feigned an excuse. (verb-transitive)
  • Archaic To invent or imagine. (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "feign" in a sentence
  • "But there is a certain romantic senseless kind of love, such as poets sometimes celebrate, and men and women feign, which is a legitimate target for ridicule."
  • "To them, therefore, I had to feign feigning: I had to feign, that is, that I was feigning to keep their confidence, but that in reality that I was betraying it; while to Mr. Chiffinch I had to disclose these precious secrets not as true but as false, and conjecture with him what was the truth."
  • "Foerster reported that employers often described the Italian worker as “lazy, shirking, tricky, a time server” and complained that Italians were known—just as slaves were once known—to “feign sickness in order not to have to work in bad weather.”"