cahoots » cohorts

Chiefly in:   in cohorts with

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Josie turns to Jake, who is, not surprisingly, in cohorts with Cole to get his hands on Tony’s money. (Univ. of Michigan Daily Online, Sep. 23, 1996)
  • They maliciously identify several blameless “Goodys,” or wives of Salem, as being in cohorts with the devil. (Univ. of Michigan Daily Online, Jan. 8, 1997)
  • He is from Saudi Arabia, was born into the ruling class. He was in cohorts with the government, then decided to go against that. (Richmond.com, Oct. 1, 2001)
  • The same group that alleged that Google was in cohorts with the FBI are now saying that they are violating wiretapping laws in California. (LCGrowth Marketing Blog, May 5, 2004)
  • Critics accuse the authorities of being in cohorts with developers, hungry for the revenue they can rake in. (Taipei Times, Mar. 22, 2005)

A natural substitution for a word that only survives in frozen idiomatic usage, since one is typically in cahoots with one’s cohorts.

| link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/09/11 |

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.