clique

Pluralcliques

Formscliques, cliquing, cliqued

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A small, exclusive group of people who associate based on shared lifestyle or social status, often closing themselves off to outsiders.

   Like an inner circle that quietly decides who belongs and who doesn't.

   A tight clique of senior staff made all the important decisions behind closed doors.

   New employees struggled to break into the cliques that ran the office.

   Similarcircle, coterie, set, faction, clan

   Note

   A borrowing from French, ultimately imitative in origin. Its form was shaped by claque, though that crossing may have happened in French before English took the word over. The social sense describes ordinary social life: people keep to their own cliques, or a clique forms. Dorothy L. Sayers, in The Five Red Herrings (1931), ranks the formation of a clique beside cold-shouldering as the usual, mild fallout of artists' quarrels.

2. 2
   verbintransitive

   To band together in a clannish way, or to work secretly with others to achieve a desired end; to plot.

   Like conspirators forming a quiet faction to steer events their way.

   Department heads cliqued behind the scenes to push their own candidate.

   The councilors clique whenever they want to block a proposal.

   Similarconspire, plot, scheme, collude

   Note

   The verb keeps the French spelling through every form: cliques, cliquing, cliqued, with no doubled letter or added k. It takes no object. People clique, or clique together, but they do not clique someone. When you need to name the group itself, use the noun: they formed a clique.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   In graph theory, a subset of vertices in which every two vertices are directly connected: a subgraph matching a complete graph.

   The algorithm searches the graph for the largest clique it can find.

   Every pair of vertices in this clique shares an edge.

   Note

   Mathematics borrows the image of the social meaning: in this group every member is directly tied to every other, so every pair of vertices is joined by an edge. Size is usually what matters. The largest clique in a graph gives its clique number, and finding that largest clique in an arbitrary graph is NP-complete.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A group of related websites that link to one another, similar to a webring but with membership controlled exclusively by the owner.

   Like a private members' ring where the host hands out the invitations.

   Their clique of poetry blogs traded links to boost each other's traffic.

   The webmaster ran an invite-only clique of gaming pages.

   Note

   A word from the fan pages of the early web. Usenet posters in 1999 were already asking what an internet clique was and what it did. People joined someone's clique, and the owner decided who got in. That gatekeeping is what separates it from an open webring and ties it back to the social meaning.

Showing meanings only. Show all 4