- sly
- sly, cunning, crafty, tricky, foxy, insidious, wily, guileful, artful are comparable when they mean having or showing a disposition to attain one's ends by devious or indirect means.Sly implies a lack of candor which shows itself in secretiveness, in suggestiveness rather than in frankness, in underhandedness, or in furtiveness or duplicity in one's dealings with others{
with knowing leer and words of sly import— Irving
}{because the state is hostile, writers have become sly, circumspect and disingenuous— Philip Toynbee
}More often than the remaining words, sly is used with weakened force to imply a lightly arch or roguish quality{he was unpretentious, earnest, full of sly humor— Rollo Brown
}Cunning (see also CLEVER 2) stresses the use of intelligence in overreaching or circumventing; nevertheless, it often suggests sly inventiveness rather than a high-grade mentality, and a perverted sense of morality{every man wishes to be wise, and they who cannot be wise are almost always cunning— Johnson
}{all gods are cruel, bitter, and to be bribed, but women- gods are mean and cunning as well— Bottomley
}{the fellow's eyes were now sly and cunning as a cat's, now hard and black as basalt— Wolfe
}Crafty also implies a use of intelligence but it usually suggests a higher order of mentality than cunning: that of one capable of devising stratagems and adroit in deception{he disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that their hands cannot perform their enterprise— Job 5:12
}{as a crafty envoy does his country's business by dint of flirting and conviviality— Montague
}{crafty senior tactician for the Republicans and a man with an astonishing record of maintaining politi-cal control of his county— Michener
}Tricky usually suggests unscrupulousness and chicanery in dealings with others; in general it connotes shiftiness and unreliability rather than skill in deception or in maneuvering{here was Woman, with a capital W, tricky and awful, inconstant as the weather— Styron
}{he avoided the mean and tricky : he was always an honorable foe— W. C. Ford
}Foxy implies shrewdness in dodging discovery or in practicing deceptions so that one may follow one's own devices or achieve one's own ends; it usually connotes experience and is rarely applied to the young or to novices{where one was legitimate—and a foxy play—the other was a snide trick— Lieb
}{this time the lecherous Alsatian uses a foxier gambit to achieve his ends— Perelman
}{a foxy old man
}Insidious suggests a lying in wait or a gradualness of effect or approach and applies especially to devious and carefully masked underhandedness{an insidious tempter
}{persuaded that these people ... are all part of an insidious conspiracy to undermine the world as he knows it— Edmund Wilson
}{thatformof bias which is most insidious, precisely because it pretends to be unbiased— Moberly
}Wily and guileful stress an attempt to ensnare or entrap; they usually imply treacherous astuteness or sagacity and a lack of scruples regarding the means to one's end{nor trust in the guileful heart and the murder-loving hand— Morris
}{shun the insidious arts that Rome provides, less dreading from her frown than from her wily praise— Wordsworth
}{the headmaster, wily, had not confiscated these articles; he had merely informed the parents concerned— Bennett
}Artful implies insinuating or alluring indirectness of dealing; it usually also connotes sophistication or coquetry or clever designs{being artful, she cajoled him with honeymouthed flattery until his suspicion was quieted— John Bennett
}{oddly enough, they stayed sober. The artful Henry had told them that all the wine in Panama was poisoned— Chidsey
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
