CUNNING • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Cunning

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/kˈənɪŋ/ Listen

Cunning

adjective

1.

Attractive especially by means of smallness or prettiness or quaintness. Synonym: cute. "A cute little apartment" , "Cunning kittens" , "A cunning baby"

2.

Marked by skill in deception. Synonyms: crafty, dodgy, foxy, guileful, knavish, slick, sly, tricksy, tricky, wily. "Deep political machinations" , "A foxy scheme" , "A slick evasive answer" , "Sly as a fox" , "Tricky Dick" , "A wily old attorney"

3.

Showing inventiveness and skill. Synonyms: clever, ingenious. "The cunning maneuvers leading to his success" , "An ingenious solution to the problem"

noun

1.

Shrewdness as demonstrated by being skilled in deception. Synonyms: craft, craftiness, foxiness, guile, slyness, wiliness.

2.

Crafty artfulness (especially in deception).

See more definitions of Cunning...

See images of 'Cunning'

Etymology of 'Cunning'

WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University

Share |

"Cunning" Quotes from Famous Books

... ways: it paralyzes, and it renders cunning. At this moment I found it inspire me. I made my plans before I started, how to steal along under the cover of the blighted brushwood which broke the line of the valley here and there. I set out only after long thought, seizing the moment when the vaguely perceived ...

— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant

... and cunning. While Alberich boasted, he was planning how he might trick the dwarf and ...

— Opera Stories from Wagner • Florence Akin

... gracious," said my Aunt Bridget, "who would have imagined you didn't know. I thought every girl in the world knew before she put up her hair and came out of short frocks. My Betsy did, I'm sure of that. And to think that you—you whom we thought so cute, so cunning. . . . Mary O'Neill, I'm ashamed of you. I really, really am! Why, you goose" (Aunt Bridget was again trying to laugh), "how did you suppose the ...

— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... vanity) that he was not considerable enough in my eyes to make me take over-ready offence at what he said, or at his haughty looks: in other words, that I had not value enough for him to treat him with peculiarity either by smiles or frowns. Indeed he had cunning enough to give me, undesignedly, a piece of instruction which taught me this caution; for he had said in conversation once, 'That if a man could not make a woman in courtship own herself pleased with him, it was as much and oftentimes more to his purpose ...

— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... questions are, all of them, perfectly simple, and primarily vital. Determine these, and you have at once a basis for national conduct in all important particulars. Leave them undetermined, and there is no limit to the distress which may be brought upon the people by the cunning of its knaves, and the folly ...

— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com