(formal, disapproving) using clever plans to achieve what you want, without people realizing what you are doing:
Machiavellian manipulation / motives / manoeuvres
ORIGIN Named after Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian statesman (1469-1527), who explained in his book The Prince, that it was often necessary for rulers to use immoral methods in order to achieve power and success.
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This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
Where does this definition of Machiavellian come from?
This entry for Machiavellian is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is Machiavellian a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, Machiavellian is tagged as adjective.
Does Machiavellian appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — Machiavellian appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
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Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
