(v. i.) A narrow circle of persons associated by common interests or for the accomplishment of a common purpose; -- generally used in a bad sense.
(v. i.) To To associate together in a clannish way; to act with others secretly to gain a desired end; to plot; -- used with together.
Example Sentences:
(1) Each movie group – Gone Girl, The Imitation Game, Selma, etc – sits defensively together, sort of like high-school cliques in the canteen of an 80s teen movie, and those proud, defiant smiles they managed to maintain for TV have long since wobbled away a bit.
(2) They just wanted the machine that would give them power as a clique.
(3) There were still quite a few Marxists at Oxford in those days – Terry Eagleton and his clique were seemingly bolted to the same table in the King’s Arms the entire time I was an undergraduate – but while I was silly and naive enough to believe in the purifying, energising effects of violent revolution, I wasn’t obtuse enough to think of dialectical materialism as anything more than a powerful heuristic.
(4) Many street disputes are not gang or even clique related, but the climate of violence created by the gangs, with their ready access to arms, means that a Hobbesian, kill-or-be-killed mentality can afflict even the most minor altercations.
(5) However, the Socialist party – the successor to Militant Tendency – described the claims as “wholly inaccurate” and said they “reflect the terror of the rightwing clique that dominates the Labour party at the wave of enthusiasm Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign is generating”.
(6) We will build a union where members’ interests are always put first – not subordinated to the political machinations of a clique.
(7) Whether Podemos can balance the demands of its grassroots activists, who expect to shape policy, with the powerful influence of Iglesias and his clique of Complutense academics, remains one of the most challenging questions for the party’s future.
(8) There is a value that unites that vast majority of British people away from the small metropolitan clique, and that value is patriotism,” Nuttall has said.
(9) "For the sake of national unity and the development of stability in Tibetan regions, we must take a clear-cut stand and deepen the struggle against the Dalai clique."
(10) They won the European Championship with something to spare and, importantly, they appear to be free of the cliques and divisions that can exist when bringing together players from different clubs, and particularly when those clubs are bonded by mutual contempt in the manner of Barcelona and Real Madrid.
(11) And if you judge it by how it treated those who told it the truth, the BBC remains a dangerous organisation, run by a managerial clique that puts its own interest before honest reporting or, indeed, the best interests of the BBC.
(12) "It is not the king who is to blame," Hamza Mansour, the secretary-general of the Islamic Action Front (the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood), recently told Le Monde, "but the clique surrounding him."
(13) It quoted a Tibetan expert who said the "Dalai Lama clique" had "instigated and enticed" the men to self-immolate.
(14) Browder says his problem isn’t with Russia as such but with the powerful clique of ex-KGB spies who have grabbed the state.
(15) We strongly believe that the holders of Ukraine’s government debt must rethink the conditions for dealing with this country and realise that rather than helping, debt relief may mean a full amnesty for a corrupt clique who has brought the nation to its knees.
(16) In July, Russian banks allied to Putin's clique were sealed off from issuing bonds on Wall Street, only to issue them the next week in Frankfurt.
(17) Noland said: “It appears to be developing into a corrupt, opaque extraction-based economy common in central Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, which generates benefits for a small ruling clique and key regime constituencies, but does not deliver prosperity for the bulk of the population.” Beneath a tiny elite at the top, benefits are spread unequally, said Smith.
(18) In his first five minutes he name-checked Picasso, quoted a poem by the Russian dissident Osip Mandelstam – not, he hoped, any relation of Lord Mandelson – and raved about both the play Jerusalem, and the anarchic cabaret La Clique, a show he saw at the Roundhouse.
(19) Given this, isn't there some truth in the accusation that Falkirk was a case of one tightly connected clique facing off against another?
(20) It is actually quite difficult for a woman to get in as part of an Old Etonian clique.
Coterie
Definition:
(n.) A set or circle of persons who meet familiarly, as for social, literary, or other purposes; a clique.
Example Sentences:
(1) The orchestrated round of warnings from the Obama administration did not impress a coterie of senior Republicans who were similarly paraded on the talk shows, blaming the White House for having brought the country to the brink of yet another "manufactured crisis".
(2) For every “coterie” of Audens, Spenders and Isherwoods, there is a chorus of George Orwells, Roy Campbells and Dylan Thomases, spitting vitriol.
(3) "The reality is that we've got a situation where the Conservative party is being run almost as if it's an exclusive coterie, and it's an exclusive coterie on the left of centre of the Conservative spectrum, allied with the Liberal Democrats who are, I think, much more pleasant to associate with from their point of view," he said.
(4) The coterie around the prime minister brought their conflict addiction, their brittle tribalism and their self-reinforcing insularity into government.
(5) Shamir was a member of the inner cabinet coterie that planned Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
(6) Hutchings, a local woman who makes much of her down-to-earth attitude in campaign literature, could be spotted at various points during the day being ushered around by a coterie of smart-suited, well-spoken young men brandishing shiny blue balloons like defensive weaponry.
(7) Two years on, Kim has assembled a seemingly impregnable coterie around him.
(8) It has been argued by a vocal coterie of disaffected dentists that premolar extraction, incisor retraction, and "backward-pulling" mechanics conspire to "distalize" the condyles and, pari passu, to produce craniomandibular dysfunction.
(9) Warsi is known to be keeping a diary and there have been fears she will publish it before the election in an effort to expose the upper-class coterie in Cameron’s inner circle.
(10) But if India has now become young, it has also a place that has redefined itself, in the last 20 years, as a place where power and influence are handed down and inherited: a country where bourgeois individualism, with all its dubious privileges, has been replaced by fiefdoms, coteries and, for a few, a fierce sense of entitlement (which should be distinguished from aspiration) endorsed by paternal blessings.
(11) It chimed with Epstein’s reputation, cultivated through the early 2000s, as an international playboy with an intercontinental property portfolio, his own Gulfstream II and Boeing 727, a profile in Vanity Fair, and an apparently loyal coterie of beautiful young women.
(12) The intervention from Stöhlker provides an insight into both the febrile atmosphere that has gripped Fifa since the dawn raids on the Baur au Lac hotel two days before Blatter’s re-election and the scramble among his coterie of official and unofficial advisers for his ear.
(13) On the contrary, government, industry, and a small coterie of scientists have combined to stymie efforts to introduce preventive measures, such as strict pollution control standards.
(14) It concerned the handover of Hong Kong, and in it he described the Chinese Communist leadership as "appalling old waxworks" and railed against Tony Blair and his coterie of advisers.
(15) Yes, I’m afraid that outside of a small coterie of fanciful libertarians and determined anti-feminists, the existence of a gender pay gap is accepted fact.
(16) At 70, he’s something of a throwback, a reminder of a more decent Tory type, a country mile from the Cameron and Osborne coterie.
(17) While Allen's new video sets out to be a feminist critique of the entertainment industry, the principal action involves Allen and a coterie of writhing black dancers and slo-mo shots of champagne being poured over the dancer's bodies.
(18) The president now takes counsel from an ever-shrinking coterie of trusted aides.
(19) He was the frontman, but she swiftly became the band's most celebrated member, exuding a nonchalant, cigarette-smoking cool onstage, her calm, measured voice the perfect foil to Francis's yowling and screaming: in the 2006 Pixies documentary, loudquietloud , Deal is pursued by her own coterie of fans, who hyperventilate when they meet her and hold up signs during gigs proclaiming her to be God.
(20) The coterie are said to work on three or four deals a month, most of which will never see the light of day.