bedevil
Americanverb (used with object)
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bedevils,
present (3rd person singular)
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bedeviled,
past participle, past
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bedevilled,
past participle, past (especially British)
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bedeviling,
present participle
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bedevilling
present participle (especially British)
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to torment or harass maliciously or diabolically, as with doubts, distractions, or worries.
-
to possess, as with a devil; bewitch.
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to cause confusion or doubt in; muddle; confound.
an issue bedeviled by prejudices.
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to beset or hamper continuously.
a new building bedeviled by elevator failures.
verb
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to harass or torment
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to throw into confusion
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to possess, as with a devil
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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bedevilsimple
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bedevilssimple
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have bedeviledperfect
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have bedevilledperfect
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has bedeviledperfect
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has bedevilledperfect
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am bedevilingprogressive
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am bedevillingprogressive
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are bedevilingprogressive
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are bedevillingprogressive
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is bedevilingprogressive
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is bedevillingprogressive
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have been bedevilingperfect progressive
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have been bedevillingperfect progressive
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has been bedevilingperfect progressive
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has been bedevillingperfect progressive
Past
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bedeviledsimple
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bedevilledsimple
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had bedeviledperfect
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had bedevilledperfect
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was bedevilingprogressive
-
was bedevillingprogressive
-
were bedevilingprogressive
-
were bedevillingprogressive
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had been bedevilingperfect progressive
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had been bedevillingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of bedevil
Explanation
To bedevil is to "be" a bit like a "devil." To bedevil means to cause trouble, or, when talking about a person, to torment or harass. Bedevil has nothing to do with the eggs you eat on a picnic. Those are just plain deviled. And although, in the 1570s, bedeviled could be taken to mean literally "possessed," the word no longer involves an actual devil, either. It just applies to people or things that make trouble like a devil would want to do.
Vocabulary lists containing bedevil
This Week in Words: August 21 - 25, 2017
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The Midwife's Apprentice
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This Week In Culture: September 28–October 4, 2019
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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:
As suspicions bedevil him—has he been duped into this marriage?
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2025
"The systemic frictions that bedevil the US-China trade relationship will not be solved any time soon," Mr Olson adds.
From BBC ● May 9, 2025
The Fremen, whose home planet is Arrakis, where Spice is mined, bedevil the miners and the troops that protect them and, as the indigenous population battling imperial usurpers, are the faction you should root for.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 17, 2024
Diseases like Alzheimer's, strokes and other cognitive impairments continue to bedevil doctors seeking a cure.
From Salon ● Apr. 4, 2024
Then he spat river water all over her skirt and she knew he lived to bedevil her again.
From "The Midwife's Apprentice" by Karen Cushman
To start, artificial intelligence likely will give individuals a much more precise answer to the question that bedevils so much of retirement planning today: How long will I live?
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 27, 2026
It is a problem that Sullivan admits bedevils him to this day, although he also notes that CPAPs have evolved over the years to become much more comfortable than during his 1980 experiment.
From Salon ● Oct. 23, 2023
As for the play, much still bedevils it.
From New York Times ● May 24, 2023
To tackle such “lawful but awful” content that frequently bedevils content moderators, the EU will require extra scrutiny for the biggest online platforms - those with 45 million monthly users.
From Washington Times ● Dec. 15, 2022
I don’t claim that Powell had it all figured out: American history bedevils the most earnest attempts to make sense of it.
From "The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates" by Wes Moore
A question has bedeviled a wealthy Lake Tahoe enclave for years: Who is poisoning the towering trees that stand sentry on the North Shore?
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 19, 2026
Homeless encampments, piles of trash, vermin, and car break-ins have bedeviled the 4000 block of Babcock Avenue in Studio City since the property was abandoned, said neighbor Clint Ledsworth.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 28, 2026
Russia seized the islands from Japan in the dying days of World War II and a dispute over their sovereignty has bedeviled relations between Moscow and Tokyo ever since.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 13, 2026
Tolo hopes to build a baseline picture of her health: She’s young and in the prime of her reproductive years, but her periods are characterized by severe pain that has long bedeviled her.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 13, 2026
The old man who had called the police was the same one whom we had constantly bedeviled as we snatched transfer pads earlier that week.
From "Bad Boy" by Walter Dean Myers
However, securing the benefits of a relationship while navigating the associated risks is the hard task that has bedevilled governments.
From BBC ● Oct. 29, 2025
The financial hit incurred from the industrial action, confirmed to Reuters by a third source inside the company, follows a record loss in 2022 when the utility was bedevilled by reactor outages.
From Reuters ● Apr. 13, 2023
Or, thanks to streaming services, we can keep the same six or seven albums from 2001-2009 on repeat for the rest of our crisis bedevilled lives.
From Salon ● Dec. 19, 2022
“Progress in arms control is also bedevilled by Newton’s Law,” he wrote in a 1987 essay.
From Washington Post ● Jul. 19, 2022
Then she consigned two bedevilled pins to Smeraldina, adding that she would see a fair girl sitting on the stone beneath the tree.
From The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi; Volume the First by Carlo Gozzi
"But they will soon be bumping against the external problems that are bedeviling the industry."
From Barron's ● Jul. 16, 2026
Luckily, Scarlet comes up with a straightforward solution to everything that’s been bedeviling her: She simply declares an end to war, forever.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 11, 2025
Mateo represents a paradox bedeviling the U.S. nursing landscape.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 6, 2025
The em dash is already quite accustomed to controversy, with a long history of charming and bedeviling authors, journalists and academics.
From Salon ● Jun. 11, 2025
I have a desk in the State Department building, and I read consular reports all day long and write letters bedeviling the consuls for not including unavailable statistics in their communications.
From Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 by Harry Bates
Those updates should shrink the error bars on the telescope’s calibrations from the tens of percentage points that have been bedevilling astronomers in some areas, down to just a few percentage points.
From Scientific American ● Oct. 11, 2022
But the supply-chain snarl-ups, container traffic jams and chip shortages bedevilling companies worldwide show no signs of going away any time soon.
From Reuters ● Oct. 26, 2021
Zuckerberg is hoping to erect a scalable system, an orderly decision tree that accounts for every eventuality and exception, but the boundaries of speech are a bedevilling problem that defies mechanistic fixes.
From The New Yorker ● Sep. 10, 2018
This roving caravan of marvels would be a logistical nightmare and a financial impossibility, but it would best express the ethos of the global museum, free of the bedevilling complications of place.
From The Guardian ● Dec. 2, 2015
What on earth could be wrong with me, I asked myself, that I should be bedevilling my students in this fashion?
From The Unpopular Review, Number 19 July-December 1918 by Various
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