wily
Americanadjective
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of wily
Middle English word dating back to 1250–1300; see origin at wile, -y 1
Explanation
Did you fall for that wily door-to-door salesman's pitch? He must be very slick and tricky to have convinced you to buy a set of new tires, considering you don't have a car. How can you remember the meaning of the adjective wily? Just think about the old Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoons. Their aptly named cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote, got his name from a clever play on words. Wile E. is supposed to be cunning, crafty, and clever — in other words, wily. Wile E. is all those things, but unfortunately he was usually bested by that pesky roadrunner anyway. Meep. Meep.
Vocabulary lists containing wily
300 Most Difficult "SAT" Words
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List 7
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The Watsons Go to Birmingham
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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.
Here Hyungjin Son, the bumpkin-ish Bardolph in “Falstaff,” portrayed the Count, while Colclough was the wily Figaro.
From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 29, 2026
It wasn’t just that Anthropic won a game of chess against that wily Hegseth.
From Slate • Apr. 14, 2026
Much of that crude is under the control of Eyyub, a wily 47-year-old Azeri trader who has been the whale in the market for Moscow’s oil since the start of the Ukraine war.
From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 19, 2026
John Rudge was at Stoke with me, as our director of sport, and was a wily old fox.
From BBC • Feb. 2, 2026
Despite his setbacks the previous year, Cal’s head coach Ky Ebright remained an extraordinarily wily opponent, widely regarded as the intellectual master of the sport.
From "The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics" by Daniel James Brown
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.
