conceit

Etymology

From Middle English conceyte, formed from conceyven by analogy with pairs such as (Modern English) deceive~deceit, receive~receipt etc. Doublet of concept and concetto. Akin to Portuguese conceito.

noun

1. (obsolete) Something conceived in the mind; an idea, a thought.
   It was after a night like this that I shocked the community with a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrated Squire Brewster […] 1922, H. P. Lovecraft, “The Tomb”, in The Vagrant
2. The faculty of conceiving ideas; mental faculty; apprehension.
   a man of quick conceit
3. Quickness of apprehension; active imagination; lively fancy.
4. (obsolete) Opinion, (neutral) judgment.
5. (now rare, dialectal) Esteem, favourable opinion.
   By him that me boughte, than quod Dysdayne, / I wonder sore he is in suche cenceyte. 1499, John Skelton, The Bowge of Courte
6. (countable) A novel or fanciful idea; a whim.
   Tasso[…] is full of conceits […] which are not only below the dignity of heroic verse but contrary to its nature. 1693, John Dryden, An Essay on Satire
   The book's main conceit is to make poetry from univocal words (words containing just one vowel) […] 2012, Lauren Elkin, Scott Esposito, The End of Oulipo?: An attempt to exhaust a movement
7. (countable, rhetoric, literature) An ingenious expression or metaphorical idea, especially in extended form or used as a literary or rhetorical device.
   The “cyberspace” conceit allows him to dramatize computer hacking in nontechnical language, although I wonder how much his somewhat florid descriptions of the “bodiless exultation of cyberspace” will mean to readers who have not experienced the illusion of power that punching the keyboard of even a dinky little word-processor can give. 1985-11-24, Gerald Jonas, “Science Fiction”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
   In the next and final stanza, Donne expands the conceit of world exploration to present us with a further distinction between the spirituality of the lovers and the “map reader” and “sea-discoverers.” 2009, Harold Bloom, John Donne, Infobase Publishing, page 16
   Jones and Palin wrote and starred in The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969) for LWT. Its conceit was to relate historical incidents as if TV had existed at the time. January 22, 2020, Stuart Jeffries, “Terry Jones obituary”, in The Guardian
8. (uncountable) Overly high self-esteem; vain pride; hubris.
   Plum'd with conceit he calls aloud. 1826, Nathaniel Cotton, Fables
9. Design; pattern.

verb

1. (obsolete) To form an idea; to think.
   Those whose […] vulgar apprehensions conceit but low of matrimonial purposes. 1643, John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
2. (obsolete, transitive) To conceive.
   That owls and ravens are ominous appearers, and presignifying unlucky events, as Christians yet conceit, was also an augurial conception. 1646, Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, V.23