PERPETRATE

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does perpetrate mean? 

• PERPETRATE (verb)
  The verb PERPETRATE has 1 sense:

1. perform an act, usually with a negative connotation

  Familiarity information: PERPETRATE used as a verb is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PERPETRATE (verb)

Present simple: I / you / we / they perpetrate    ... he / she / it perpetrates   
Past simple: perpetrated   
Past participle: perpetrated   
-ing form: perpetrating   

Sense 1

Meaning:

Perform an act, usually with a negative connotation

Classified under:

Verbs of political and social activities and events

Synonyms:

commit; perpetrate; pull

Context example:

pull a bank robbery

Hypernyms (to "perpetrate" is one way to...):

act; move (perform an action, or work out or perform (an action))

Troponyms (each of the following is one way to "perpetrate"):

make (carry out or commit)

recommit (commit once again, as of a crime)

Sentence frame:

Somebody ----s something

Derivation:

perpetration (the act of committing a crime)

perpetrator (someone who perpetrates wrongdoing)

 Context examples 

Some of these stood respectfully at a distance; but two of them, women, perpetrated the hostile act of clutching the master around the neck.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

I had been the author of unalterable evils, and I lived in daily fear lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

On the first of these occasions, she perpetrated the attempt to burn me in my bed; on the second, she paid that ghastly visit to you.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

In a fit of anger, however, caused by some robberies which had been perpetrated in the house, he beat his native butler to death and narrowly escaped a capital sentence.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The police are of opinion that this outrage may have been perpetrated upon Miss Cushing by these youths, who owed her a grudge and who hoped to frighten her by sending her these relics of the dissecting-rooms.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

The comic verse-writers and the cartoonists took hold of it with screaming laughter, and in the personal columns of society weeklies jokes were perpetrated on it to the effect that Charley Frensham told Archie Jennings, in confidence, that five lines of Ephemera would drive a man to beat a cripple, and that ten lines would send him to the bottom of the river.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Mr Elliot is a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself; whom for his own interest or ease, would be guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery, that could be perpetrated without risk of his general character.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

Perhaps some new devilry of the gods was about to be perpetrated on him.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

She paused, weeping, and then continued, I thought with horror, my sweet lady, that you should believe your Justine, whom your blessed aunt had so highly honoured, and whom you loved, was a creature capable of a crime which none but the devil himself could have perpetrated.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)