# clique

Pronunciation: say "KLEEK" /kliːk/

## Noun

1. A small, exclusive group of people who associate based on shared lifestyle or social status, often closing themselves off to outsiders.
   - Simple: A small group of people who stick together and keep others out.
   - _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._
3. In graph theory, a subset of vertices in which every two vertices are directly connected: a subgraph matching a complete graph.
   - Simple: In math, a group of dots in a network where each dot connects to all the others.
   - _The algorithm searches the graph for the largest clique it can find._
   - _Every pair of vertices in this clique shares an edge._
4. A group of related websites that link to one another, similar to a webring but with membership controlled exclusively by the owner.
   - Simple: A set of related websites that link to each other, where the owner chooses who can join.
   - _Their clique of poetry blogs traded links to boost each other's traffic._
   - _The webmaster ran an invite-only clique of gaming pages._

## Verb

2. To band together in a clannish way, or to work secretly with others to achieve a desired end; to plot.
   - Simple: To join with a few others and stay apart from everyone else, often to get your own way.
   - _Department heads cliqued behind the scenes to push their own candidate._
   - _The councilors clique whenever they want to block a proposal._

## Origin

Borrowed from French "clique", ultimately of imitative origin. It was influenced by "claque", though this may have happened in French rather than in English.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/clique (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).