CONTRIVED

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does contrived mean? 

• CONTRIVED (adjective)
  The adjective CONTRIVED has 2 senses:

1. showing effects of planning or manipulation

2. artificially formal

  Familiarity information: CONTRIVED used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• CONTRIVED (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Showing effects of planning or manipulation

Context example:

a novel with a contrived ending

Similar:

planned (designed or carried out according to a plan)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Artificially formal

Synonyms:

artificial; contrived; hokey; stilted

Context example:

when people try to correct their speech they develop a stilted pronunciation

Similar:

affected; unnatural (speaking or behaving in an artificial way to make an impression)

 Context examples 

She procured plain work; she plaited straw and by various means contrived to earn a pittance scarcely sufficient to support life.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Would Jane but go, means were to be found, servants sent, friends contrived—no travelling difficulty allowed to exist; but still she had declined it!

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

An object contrived for a specific purpose.

(Device, NCI Thesaurus)

The queen’s joiner had contrived in one of Glumdalclitch’s rooms, a kind of wooden machine five-and-twenty feet high, formed like a standing ladder; the steps were each fifty feet long.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Without one overt act of hostility, one upbraiding word, he contrived to impress me momently with the conviction that I was put beyond the pale of his favour.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Mrs. Bennet, through the assistance of servants, contrived to have the earliest tidings of it, that the period of anxiety and fretfulness on her side might be as long as it could.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

And yet this woman—who knows what her art may have been? —how long it may have been premeditated, and how deeply contrived by her!

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

The squire raised his gun, the rowing ceased, and we leaned over to the other side to keep the balance, and all was so nicely contrived that we did not ship a drop.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

But while he eyed the approaching hand, he at the same time contrived to keep track of the club in the other hand, suspended threateningly above him.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

How I found time to haunt Putney, I am sure I don't know; but I contrived, by some means or other, to prowl about the neighbourhood pretty often.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)