circumvent
verb
Lynne McTaggart
Did you know?
The Circular History of Circumvent
If you’ve ever felt as if someone was running circles around those trying to get something done, you have an idea of the origins of circumvent—it comes from the Latin word circumventus, a form of the verb circumvenire, meaning “to surround or go around” (circumvenire combines the adverb circum, “in a circle around,” and the verb venire, “to come”). The earliest uses of circumvent referred to a tactic of hunting or warfare in which the quarry or enemy was encircled and captured. This meaning doesn’t exactly square with modern uses of the word. Today, circumvent more often suggests avoidance than entrapment; to come full circle, it typically means to “get around” someone or something, as by evading a problem or avoiding the law.
Examples of circumvent in a Sentence
Jay McInerney, New York Times Book Review, 10 June 2007
… Rondon and Lyra paddled to the right side, where they found a channel that circumvented the worst part of the rapids.
—Candice Millard, The River of Doubt, 2005
His appreciation of this finer side of life is circumvented by a cynicism that he tells me is common to Eastern Europeans.
—Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness, 1991
The thirty-six-hour workweek established by the garment-industry code was circumvented by having the workers punch out at five P.M., leave by the back door (their usual entrance), then return by the front door and work until eleven P.M. without punching the clock.
—Melissa Hield, Speaking For Ourselves, (1977) 1984
We circumvented the problem by using a different program.
He found a way to circumvent the law.
Henry Gass, The Christian Science Monitor, 12 Mar. 2025
But Consumer Reports was able to easily circumvent that restriction by simply playing an audio recording from a computer.
—Kevin Collier, NBC News, 10 Mar. 2025
According to recent evidence, the industry’s newer reasoning models may already possess the ability to manipulate and circumvent their human programmers’ goals.
—Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 6 Mar. 2025
This mode uses software smarts to determine the edges of subjects and apply an oftentimes imperfect blur—particularly around hair and eyeglasses—but Xiaomi's concept circumvents this problem thanks to its large sensor.
—Simon Hill, WIRED, 3 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for circumvent
Cite this Entry
“Circumvent.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/circumvent. Accessed 22 Mar. 2025.
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circumvent
verb
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