sly
Americanadjective
-
slyer,
comparative
-
slier,
comparative
-
slyest,
superlative
-
sliest
superlative
idioms
adjective
-
crafty; artful
a sly dodge
-
insidious; furtive
a sly manner
-
playfully mischievous; roguish
sly humour
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of sly
First recorded in 1150–1200; Middle English sly, sley , from Old Norse slœgr “sly, cunning” (originally “able to strike, able to slay”); see slay ( def. )
Explanation
When you're sly, you're crafty, cunning, tricky, and wily. Being sly is being deceitful, though not in the worst way. If you're good at lying, you're quite sly: people who are sly are good at pulling one over on other people. Being sly helps you get away with things. If you made a mess in your house but got your parents to blame the dog, that was sly. Being sly means you're not being honest, but this word has kind of a harmless flavor to it. Someone who killed someone and lied about it would not be described as sly. Slyness has to do with smaller, sneakier, more harmless kinds of lying.
Vocabulary lists containing sly
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
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Scrabble: Words with no Vowels
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
You have to be clever, not sly, in how you deal with it.
From BBC ● May 8, 2026
“The long and winding road is more than a song,” he sings, with a sly wink to his Beatles past.
From Salon ● Apr. 24, 2026
I saw his pale skin turned purple, his sly mouth gone flat.
From Slate ● Apr. 23, 2026
On the plane, just a few pages into the novel, I was struck by Wharton’s sly deployment of punctuation.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 5, 2026
The sly old devil was definitely up to something, he was certain of it.
From "Redwall" by Brian Jacques
But I began to suspect he was up to something slier in the course of this 800-plus-page doorstopper.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 2, 2021
Julia understands digital media—and print media, for that matter—as well as anyone I’ve ever met, and every day she made the Slate we were editing together slier and fresher and more fun.
From Slate ● Oct. 26, 2018
It’s only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.
From "Cat's Eye" by Margaret Atwood
The hungry thousands that crowded and pushed at Willard's thought him one of them, only deeper and slier.
From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861 by Various
He had a Sompnour ready to his hand, A slier boy was none in Engleland; For subtlely he had his espiaille,* *espionage That taught him well where it might aught avail.
From The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems by D. Laing Purves
Considering the series’ tone and genre, one may expect the conversion to shift into the age-old “Die Hard” debate – but series creator Joe Barton is slyer than that.
From Salon ● Dec. 7, 2024
And in one of the film’s slyer jokes, the hip-hop song “White Boy Summer” by their son Chet Hanks is used to personify a certain kind of clueless obliviousness in others.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 28, 2022
And other late-night hosts also frankly and straightforwardly used the word on Monday, which was refreshing—though some were slyer about its usage than others.
From Slate ● Jul. 30, 2019
But given their lines, it’s impossible for them not to register as grotesquely obtuse variations on the limousine-liberal guilt junkies from the slyer, fuller plays of Wallace Shawn.
From New York Times ● Oct. 15, 2018
So it’s interesting, and more than a little disturbing, to see how Barb turned out—that she’s meaner and slyer than I am, more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I’d hoped.
From "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich
One of the last performances I saw in 2017 was one of the sliest: Billy Crudup in David Cale’s “Harry Clarke” at New York’s Vineyard Theatre.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 16, 2018
The sliest old thief that you ever did see; Hi, ho, see the chips fly!
From The Adventures of Unc' Billy Possum by Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo) Burgess
"Will my learned friend," said Mr. P —— with one of his sliest sneers, "inform us what motive the defendant could possibly have to keep back a witness so necessary to him?"
From The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney by Samuel Warren
Still, even through the layers of our contemporary hindsight, the slyest moments of Weinberger’s score make a convincing argument for the piece.
From New York Times ● Nov. 12, 2020
Peter Debruge in Variety noted "of all the satirists working in cinema today, Östlund displays perhaps the slyest streak of dark humor."
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 3, 2014
These jokes expired about the time Twitter’s co-founders taught Oprah how to tweet on the air in 2009, and yet here they are, on one of the slyest shows on television in 2013.
From Slate ● Feb. 8, 2013
Where the network’s “True Detective” occasionally broke its dolefulness with the slyest, philosophically artful wink at an audience riveted by its mystery, “The Leftovers” grafts more unhappiness onto unhappiness.
From Washington Post
It's the slyest trick the old fox has ever tried to play on us.
From A Man of the People A Drama of Abraham Lincoln by Thomas Dixon
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
