conceit

noun

1. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)Something conceived in the mind; an idea, a thought.

   “In laughing, there ever procedeth a conceit of somewhat ridiculous.”

   “a man wise in his own conceit”

   “It was after a night like this that I shocked the community with a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrated Squire Brewster […]”

2. (countable, uncountable)The faculty of conceiving ideas; mental faculty; apprehension.

   “a man of quick conceit”

   “How often, alas! did her eyes say unto me that they loved! and yet I, not looking for such a matter, had not my conceit open to understand them.”

3. (countable, uncountable)Quickness of apprehension; active imagination; lively fancy.

   “His wit's as thick as Tewksbury mustard; there is no more conceit in him than is in a mallet.”

4. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)Opinion, (neutral) judgment.
5. (archaic, countable, dialectal, uncountable)Esteem, favourable opinion.

   “By him that me boughte, than quod Dysdayne, / I wonder sore he is in suche cenceyte.”

   “[G]ive him thy thanks for putting her into conceit with the sex that thou hast given her so much reason to execrate.”

6. (countable)A novel or fanciful idea; a whim.

   “On his way to the gibbet, a freak took him in the head to go off with a conceit.”

   “Some to conceit alone their works confine, / And glitt'ring thoughts struck out at ev'ry line.”

   “Tasso[…] is full of conceits […] which are not only below the dignity of heroic verse but contrary to its nature.”

   “By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”

   “The book's main conceit is to make poetry from univocal words (words containing just one vowel) […]”

7. (countable, rhetoric)An ingenious expression or metaphorical idea, especially in extended form or used as a literary or rhetorical device.

   “The “cyberspace” conceit allows him to dramatize computer hacking in nontechnical language, although I wonder how much his somewhat florid descriptions of the “bodiless exultation of cyberspace” will mean to readers who have not experienced the illusion of power that punching the keyboard of even a dinky little word-processor can give.”

   “In the next and final stanza, Donne expands the conceit of world exploration to present us with a further distinction between the spirituality of the lovers and the “map reader” and “sea-discoverers.””

   “Jones and Palin wrote and starred in The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969) for LWT. Its conceit was to relate historical incidents as if TV had existed at the time.”

8. (uncountable)Overly high self-esteem; vain pride; hubris.

   “Plum'd with conceit he calls aloud.”

9. (countable, uncountable)Design; pattern.

   “And yet I know not how conceit may rob the treasury of life when life itself yields to the theft;”

verb

1. (obsolete)To form an idea; to think.

   “Those whose […] vulgar apprehensions conceit but low of matrimonial purposes.”

2. (obsolete, transitive)To conceive.

   “[T]his Medicine he conceits worse than the Disesase.”

   “That owls and ravens are ominous appearers, and presignifying unlucky events, as Christians yet conceit, was also an augurial conception.”

   “The strong, by conceiting themselves weak, are therebly rendered as inactive […] as if they really were so.”