# scheme

Pronunciation: say "SKEEM" /skiːm/

## Noun

1. A secret and devious plan, such as a plot to cheat or harm others.
   - Simple: A secret plan to do something sneaky or dishonest.
   - _She saw through his scheme to turn her friends against her._
   - _Three city officials were charged for their part in a bribery scheme that ran for years._
2. A carefully worked-out, systematic plan for what is to be done in the future.
   - Simple: A careful, well-organized plan for what will be done in the future.
   - _Under the new scheme, each department will submit its budget a month earlier._
   - _Engineers have proposed a high-speed rail scheme linking the two cities._
3. An orderly arrangement of related parts, considered as a whole.
   - Simple: The orderly way that connected parts are put together.
   - _In the grand scheme of things, a single bad review hardly matters._
   - _The rhymes in every stanza follow the same scheme, ABAB, until the final couplet._
5. A chart or diagram that represents a system or an object.
   - Simple: A drawing or chart that shows a system or an object.
   - _Scheme 2 shows each step of the reaction, from the starting material to the final product._
   - _In the journal article, the second scheme lays out every step by which the starting compound is turned into the finished drug._
6. A pension plan: an arrangement, often run by an employer or the state, that collects contributions and pays pensions to its members. *(UK)*
   - Simple: A plan that people or their employers pay into while they work, so that they get money after they retire.
   - _Staff who leave the firm keep the rights they have built up in its pension scheme._
   - _The trustees run the scheme on behalf of its members and pay their pensions when they retire._
7. A council housing estate, a neighborhood of homes that the local council built to rent out. *(dialectal, Scotland, UK)*
   - Simple: A group of homes that the local council built to rent out to people.
   - _She grew up in a scheme on the edge of Glasgow and still goes back to see her gran._
   - _The bus only comes out to the scheme twice an hour after six._
8. In rhetoric, an artful departure from the usual order or arrangement of words.
   - Simple: A clever way of putting words in an unusual order.
   - _The speech ends with chiasmus, a scheme in which the key words of one phrase come back in reverse order in the next._
   - _Alongside metaphor and irony, the preacher leaned on one scheme above all: opening every clause with the same word._

## Verb

4. To make secret or clever plans, often dishonest ones, to bring something about.
   - Simple: To make secret plans, often to get something in a dishonest way.
   - _Her rivals had been scheming for months to push her off the board._
   - _Courtiers who scheme against the king rarely live to old age._

## Other meanings

- (noun) The part of a uniform resource identifier (URI), such as http or news, that indicates the protocol or other purpose of the address.
- (noun) In astrology, a representation of the aspects of the celestial bodies at a given moment or event.
- (noun) A structure generalizing algebraic varieties, for example by allowing multiplicities and definition over any commutative ring; formally, a locally ringed space covered by open sets each isomorphic to a commutative ring's spectrum.

## Origin

The word goes back to Ancient Greek ἔχω (ékhō, “I hold”), which gave σχῆμα (skhêma, “form, shape”); Medieval Latin took this as schēma (“figure, form”), and English borrowed it from there. Its doublet is schema; compare also sketch.

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