conned

Several verbs share this past form, and register sorts them out. The everyday one is informal: to trick or defraud, often with into (conned them into signing). A rare, bookish con means to study closely or learn by heart, so lines conned for a play were memorized, not stolen; an obsolete one meant simply to know. Ship-handling has its own, the pilot's steering verb.

The ship-handling past: whoever conned a vessel watched its course and told the helmsman how to steer, especially through a channel rather than along a compass heading. The base verb already ends in a double n, while con doubles its n before -ed, so the two pasts meet in one spelling. The matching noun survives in the phrases have the conn and take the conn.

Behind this form stands conne, an obsolete spelling of con. Its silent e takes only -d, so it lands on exactly the same spelling as the modern verb, and the two pasts cannot be told apart on the page. In an old text, read it with whichever of the meanings of con the context calls for.