Sample sentences for CONTRIVED

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Definition

unnatural seeming (due to careful planning)

or more rarely:

arranged (that something should happen)

The novel has a contrived ending.

contrived = unnatural seeming (due to careful planning)

contrived coyness
The queen commanded her own cabinet-maker to contrive a box, that might serve me for a bedchamber,
Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver's Travels

contrive = devise (or arrange or invent)

(editor's note: The suffix "-ive" converts a word into an adjective; though over time, what was originally an adjective often comes to be used as a noun. The adjective pattern means tending to and is seen in words like attractive, impressive, and supportive. Examples of the noun include narrative, alternative, and detective.)

Why, I spotted you for a boy when you was threading the needle; and I contrived the other things just to make certain.
Mark Twain -- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

contrived = made up (arranged)

Why could not we contrive a place like that, where we could sleep safely at night?
Johann Wyss -- The Swiss Family Robinson

contrive = arrange

Anyhow, there's one thing—there's more honor in getting him out through a lot of difficulties and dangers, where there warn't one of them furnished to you by the people who it was their duty to furnish them, and you had to contrive them all out of your own head.
Mark Twain -- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

There is nothing more dread and more shameless than a woman who plans such deeds in her heart as the foul deed which she plotted when she contrived her husband's murder.
Homer
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
John F. Kennedy
Though Kutuzov had dismissed all unnecessary men from the staff, Boris had contrived to remain at headquarters after the changes.
Tolstoy, Leo -- War and Peace
As fast as laws are devised, their evasion is contrived.
German Proverb
Utterson so contrived that he remained behind after the others had departed.
Stevenson, Robert Louis -- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor -- Crime And Punishment
Lady Susan has certainly contrived, in the space of a fortnight, to make my brother like her.
Austen, Jane -- Lady Susan
This is not a revolution that will overthrow anything, or if it does, it will do so in ways we could never contrive in advance.
William P. Young -- The Shack

This was difficult with the mice which Terry had contrived to use instead of monkeys, because of their size.
Sinclair Lewis -- Arrowsmith
By comparison, the chariot costume seems garish, the interview dress too contrived.
Suzanne Collins -- The Hunger Games
CONTRIVANCES Aro did not rejoin his anxious guard waiting on the north side of the clearing; instead, he waved them forward.
Stephenie Meyer -- Breaking Dawn
And then, if we could contrive it, the trumpet would be skilfully transferred to Florence Bishop.
Virginia Woolf -- A Sketch of the Past

This time she contrived to mention Garin.
George R.R. Martin -- A Feast For Crows
Las Vegas is now so contrived and artificial that it has become something authentic, a place unlike any other.
Eric Schlosser -- Fast Food Nation

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