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feign

UK/feɪn/US/feɪn/
verbC2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,882 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: feigned, feigning, feigns

To feign is to pretend to have a feeling or a condition. Feign surprise, feign illness, feigned indifference.

It is formal and always about a state rather than an act: you feign interest and fake a signature. Feigning an injury is a specific offence in several sports and a specific fraud in insurance. The g is silent, and the word is a relative of fiction.

Definitions of feign

  1. 1verbfeignTo pretend to have a feeling or a condition.C2

    “She feigned illness to get out of the maths test.”

feign is a pretending.

Remember it

FEIGN → the FAINT that was not real

She let herself go down in a faint that was not real at all.

hooks ontofaint

Where it comes from

Old French feindre comes from Latin fingere, to shape or invent. Fiction and figment are relatives.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *dʰeyǵʰ-

  2. Latin

    fingo — to form, shape, invent

  3. Old French

    feindre — to pretend

  4. Middle English

    feynen

  5. English, today

    feign

From Middle English feynen, feinen, borrowed from Old French feindre (“to pretend”), from Latin fingo (“to form, shape, invent”). Compare French feignant literally “feigning”. Also compare feint, figment and fiction.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

feign in the wild

  • For example, some homeless individuals may feign mental illness to gain hospital admission.

    Malingering

  • The phrase "feigned madness" is commonly used to describe the deliberate simulation of mental illness for purposes of evasion, deception, or diverting suspicion.

    Malingering

  • Undoing refers to the phenomenon whereby a person tries to alter the past in some way to avoid or feign disappearance of an adversity or mishap.

    Undoing (psychology)

  • The technique involves bringing the rear leg forward to feign a kick, then snapping the leg back while throwing a cross, resulting in greater power behind the punch.

    Superman punch

  • A feigned retreat is one of the more difficult tactics for a military force to undertake, and requires well-disciplined soldiers.

    Feigned retreat

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the fingo family

figure

feign — used about once every 7,462 pages · #10,882 · point at the bar for the others