Other forms: convinced, convincing, convinces
To convince someone is to get them to believe you. The friend who convinces you a three-hour film is worth it, the salesman who convinces your dad the old boiler will never last another winter.
Convince runs with of or that: he convinced me of his innocence, she convinced me that the ladder was safe. It is worth keeping apart from persuade — convince changes what somebody believes, persuade moves them to do something, so you convince a jury and you persuade a friend to come out. The past participle doubles as an adjective, and I'm convinced means I am certain, not that anyone worked on me. Convincing means believable: a convincing excuse, a convincing win, and an unconvincing one that nobody buys. The noun is conviction, which is also what a court hands down.
1verbconvinceTo make someone believe that something is true.~38%
“It took an hour to convince her that the letter was genuine.”
2verbpersuadeTo make someone decide to do something.~62%
“We finally convinced him to see a doctor.”
synonyms: persuade, win over
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Convince and convict are the same Latin word arriving twice. Convinco came from vinco, to conquer, to vanquish, so to convince somebody was to defeat them — to beat the argument so thoroughly that nothing was left to say. The courtroom kept the hard half in convict, and everyday English kept the win.
Proto-Indo-European
*weyk-
Latin
convincō — to refute, prove
English, today
convince
Built from
Latin convincō (“to refute, prove”), from con- + vincō (“to conquer, vanquish”). a doublet of convict. Displaced native oferreċċan.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA