wily means sly, cunning, full of tricks. It carries an Arena rating of 1655, earned across 5 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, wily ranks #179 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #2,888 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #4,270 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words, #5,801 of 17,127 for Most Vivid Words.
wily is pronounced /ˈwaɪ.li/.
Why “wily” is a great word
Full of crafty, opportunistic skill in the practice of deception. From Middle English wily, from wile (meaning 'a trick or stratagem') + the adjectival suffix -y, first attested c. 1300. Unlike cunning, which often implies a colder, more intellectual architecture of plans, or guileless, its blameless opposite, wily speaks to a practical, improvisational knack for the advantageous ruse. It is the glint in a fox's eye as it doubles back through the brambles, the card player who deals from the bottom with fingers you never saw move, the honeyed tone that follows a too-long pause—deception not as a cold calculation, but as a living, breathing pulse in the art of getting what one wants.
Etymology
From Middle English wily, wiley, wyly. By surface analysis, wil(e) + -y.
adj
- Sly, cunning, full of tricks.e.g.“Horatio's new girlfriend is a wily coquette, and poor Horatio is too smitten to see it.”
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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