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Cabal has been associated with a group of five ministers in the government of England's King Charles II. The initial letters of the names or titles of those men (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale) spelled cabal, and they have been collectively dubbed as the "Cabal Cabinet" or "Cabal Ministry." But these five names are not the source of the word cabal, which was in use decades before Charles II ascended the throne. The term traces back to cabbala, the Medieval Latin name for the Kabbalah, a traditional system of esoteric Jewish mysticism. Latin borrowed Cabbala from the Hebrew qabbālāh, meaning "received or traditional lore."
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Examples of cabal in a Sentence
Sean Williams, Harper's Magazine, 23 Sep. 2024
Still, his most convincing point is that Agatha’s plan to physically outrun an almighty cabal of witches without any powers of her own is the kind of stupid move that usually ends up in a stupid death.
—Caroline Framke, Vulture, 18 Sep. 2024
And in both countries, conspiracy theories—notably QAnon, the now infamous movement that imagines Trump to be rescuing the world from a secret cabal of pedophiles—and the vilification of mainstream media and political elites played an extraordinary role in stoking the violence.
—Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Foreign Affairs, 3 Feb. 2021
It was supposed to be decentralized and anti-authoritarian, but a tiny cabal of mining pools came to dominate network activity, and access to the cryptocurrency more or less depends on exchanges that have proved exceedingly vulnerable to both fraud and regulation.
—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2024
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“Cabal.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cabal. Accessed 30 Nov. 2024.
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