wily

adj

wily

adj

/ˈwaɪ.li/

Etymology From Middle English wily, wiley, wyly. By surface analysis, wil(e) + -y.

1

Sly, cunning, full of tricks.

Horatio's new girlfriend is a wily coquette, and poor Horatio is too smitten to see it.
Of all the medical monsters Peter Hotez could have set out to slay, the Yale University researcher could not have chosen a more wily and obscure villain than the hookworm.1996 October 6, William Hathaway, “PARASITE LINKS MEN IN DARING VENTURE”, in Hartford Courant, archived from the original on 28 Nov 2020:

Synonyms: astute, artful, cautelous, crafty, cunning, devious, diabolical, foxlike, foxy, frood, guileful, shrewd, slim, sly, subtle, tricksy, tricky, vulpine, wily
Antonyms: guileless, gullible, honest, ingenuous, naive, unwise
Derived terms: wilily, wiliness, wily beguily
Related terms: learned, wise
Hypernyms: deceitful, intelligent

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.