Definition of "connote" [con•note]

• To suggest or imply in addition to literal meaning: "The term 'liberal arts' connotes a certain elevation above utilitarian concerns” ( George F. Will). See Usage Note at denote. (verb-transitive)
• To have as a related or attendant condition: For a political leader, hesitation is apt to connote weakness. (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.

• "A few heroines who carry the name connote eroticism, shrewdness and the alien (sometimes associated with the stereotype of a Jew)."
• "The roots of the word connote "the gathering of knowledge" and this sense some years ago in my European lunch companions led me into a very fruitless argument about e.g. whether Aristotle was a scientist."
• "The arrangement of things into classes, such as the class _metal_, or the class _man_, is grounded indeed on a resemblance among the things which are placed in the same class, but not on a mere general resemblance: the resemblance it is grounded on consists in the possession by all those things, of certain common peculiarities; and those peculiarities it is which the terms connote, and which the propositions consequently assert; not the resemblance."