Word.ws English Dictionary

Trollope ploy

Trollope ploy noun: a negotiation technique in which a proposal from another party is deliberately misinterpreted in such a way that it is more to the responding party's liking, with the aim of having the misinterpreted version accepted in the interests of diplomacy.

Noun

Trollope ploy (plural Trollope ploys)

  1. A negotiation technique in which a proposal from another party is deliberately misinterpreted in such a way that it is more to the responding party's liking, with the aim of having the misinterpreted version accepted in the interests of diplomacy.

Forms of Trollope ploy

pluralTrollope ploys

Origin of Trollope ploy

Named after an incident from an Anthony Trollope novel in which a woman interprets a casual romantic gesture as a marriage proposal.

Questions about Trollope ploy

What does Trollope ploy mean?
Trollope ploy means a negotiation technique in which a proposal from another party is deliberately misinterpreted in such a way that it is more to the responding party's liking, with the aim of having the misinterpreted version accepted in the interests of diplomacy.
What part of speech is Trollope ploy?
Trollope ploy is a noun.
What is the plural of Trollope ploy?
The plural of Trollope ploy is Trollope ploys.

Words near Trollope ploy in the dictionary

  1. trollman
  2. trollmen
  3. trollness
  4. trollop
  5. Trollope
  6. Trollope ploy
  7. Trollope ploys
  8. Trollopean
  9. Trollopeana
  10. trolloped
  11. trollopee

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Trollope ploy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Trollope ploy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/trollope_ploy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.