devil's advocate
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.51 in modern English
24
Scrabble Score
14
Letters
4
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
One who debates from a viewpoint which one may not actually hold, usually to determine its validity or simply for the sake of argument.
noun
A canon lawyer appointed by the Church to argue against the canonization of the proposed candidate.
Example Sentences
- "I don't really believe all that – I was just playing devil's advocate."
- "Now, play devil's advocate. Can't you live 20 years on $145,000 if you're living out of a motor home and just eating and painting and writing books? I mean, this is what we talked about when we were 19. Remember, we kept saying, "Let's find ourselves," but we didn't have a dollar! So, we watched television instead."
- "Disclaimer: people shouldn't take things I say too personally, I'm often a bit blunt and like to devil's advocate and debate things (another part of this is that I've typically not bothered to post on things that are correct, but to correct things when they're wrong... if you take everything I don't respond to as an affirmation, I'm extremely nice:)"
- "I don't want to get bogged down devil's-advocating for a position I don't personally hold (I think a government worker should not be allowed to bring religious beliefs into the job, just to be clear), but her position is a little different than the absolute you're making it into."
Etymology
Calque of Latin advocātus diabolī (“the devil’s advocate”), a popular title given to the officer dealing with the canonization process in the 16th c.