Crossword clues for instigate
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Instigate \In"sti*gate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Instigated; p. pr. & vb. n. Instigating.] [L. instigatus, p. p. of instigare to instigate; pref. in- in + a root akin to G. stechen to prick, E. stick. See Stick.] To goad or urge forward; to set on; to provoke; to incite; -- used chiefly with reference to evil actions; as, to instigate one to a crime.
He hath only instigated his blackest agents to the very
extent of their malignity.
--Bp.
Warburton.
Syn: To stimulate; urge; spur; provoke; tempt; incite; impel; encourage; animate.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1540s, back-formation from instigation or else from Latin instigatus, past participle of instigare "to urge on, incite" (see instigation). Related: Instigated; instigates; instigating.
Wiktionary
vb. To goad or urge forward; to set on; to provoke; to incite.
WordNet
Usage examples of "instigate".
He also instigated sieges and although Urquhart was too strong for him other castles did fall to him including Banff, Elgin and Inverness.
Thousands of peasants were instigated to rise under the pretext of appeasing the troubles of Bergamo and Brescia.
The devastating avalanche in Bhutan was one I instigated twenty years ago.
Her saving of the Library from the mob instigated by Cyril the Patriarch of Alexandria is the breakpoint between this universe and ours.
The Dales and their lords had not been responsible even in small part for instigating any of that.
Furthermore, Diamat had been glad of it, and might even have instigated the seizure.
What if the federal security boys had infiltrated the Gaters and were instigating this renewed outbreak of Gater activity?
He tried to fasten a theft on my brother this morning, and then caps the climax by instigating Mortlake to try to steal the ideas of our aeroplane.
The bloodbath in Berlin was instigated by a group that included jokers, aces, and nats, and we would do well to remember that and remind the world of it forcefully.
Canning censured the foreign diplomacy of the country, instancing the case of one minister being at Paris to negociate peace, while another at Berlin was instigating war for the same object.
Then in 1905 the first Roosevelt, seeking to arrive at a diplomatic understanding with Japan, instigated an exchange of opinions between Secretary of War Taft, then in the Far East, and Count Katsura, amounting to a secret treaty, by which the Roosevelt administration assented to the establishment by Japan of a military protectorate in Korea.
The seeker spun away, not played out by half, and angled off across the hall in the general direction of the skeleton which reached out with one halting arm and clutched at it The seeker sailed right on along, instigating a rain of finger bones, and left the skeleton waving a bony stump.
He it was who instigated the massacres of September, the atrocities of Nantes, the horrors of Thermidor, the sacrileges, the noyades: all with the view of causing every section of the National Assembly to vie with the other in excesses and in cruelty, until the makers of the Revolution, satiated with their own lust, turned on one another, and Sardanapalus-like buried themselves and their orgies in the vast hecatomb of a self-consumed anarchy.
Whether rival traders, deserters from an American ship, living with the Sitkan Indians, instigated the conspiracy cannot be known.
Yet it is a fact known to almost everyone familiar with the Anarchist movement that a great number of acts, for which Anarchists had to suffer, either originated with the capitalist press or were instigated, if not directly perpetrated, by the police.