What does complicit mean?
Complicit is an adjective describing someone who shares responsibility for a crime, wrongdoing, or unethical act committed by others. A person may be actively complicit by directly helping, or passively complicit by knowingly permitting or staying silent about the behavior. The word almost always appears with negative connotation, most commonly in phrases like 'complicit in corruption' or 'complicit in the cover-up.' It implies guilt that is joint rather than solitary: the complicit person need not have initiated the wrongdoing but contributed to it or allowed it to proceed. Derived from the noun complicity, which entered English earlier, the adjective gained widespread currency in the twentieth century as public discussion turned to institutional and collective forms of blame. It is useful precisely because it captures a middle ground between innocence and full criminal agency — a way of naming those who enable harm without necessarily committing it themselves.
adjectiveHelping to commit a crime or wrongdoing, or being involved in it together with others; sharing responsibility for another person's or group's bad actions.
- Being jointly guilty of, or assisting in, someone else's crime or wrongful act.
- More broadly, being knowingly involved in or passively enabling any harmful or unethical activity, even without legal culpability.
"The auditor was complicit in hiding the company's losses from regulators."
"Police charged him with fraud after discovering he had been complicit in his business partner's scheme."
"Critics argued that the government was complicit through its silence on the abuses."
Though the idea of shared guilt is ancient, 'complicit' only became common in English dictionaries in the twentieth century — a word born for an age of bureaucracies, where no one person pulls every trigger.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of complicit
Complicit derives from Latin 'complex', past participle of 'complecti', meaning 'to entwine or fold together'. The related noun 'complicity', borrowed via French, was established in English by the mid-seventeenth century, while the adjective 'complicit' appeared later and became widely used in the twentieth century. It belongs to a family of English words built on the same Latin root, including explicit, implicit, and duplicate.
Related word forms
How complicit is actually used
Complicit is always used with reference to some wrongdoing and carries strongly negative moral connotations. It typically appears in the phrase 'complicit in' followed by the specific act or situation. It applies to both active participation and knowing silence or inaction — a person can be called complicit merely by failing to object. The word is standard in formal writing, journalism, and everyday speech alike.
Easily confused with complicit
Complicit is the adjective describing a person's state of being implicated in wrongdoing, while complicity is the noun denoting the fact or condition of such involvement itself.