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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

sly.

Artfully cunning; secretly mischievous; wily.

3 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/slaɪ/

  1. Artfully cunning; secretly mischievous; wily.

  2. Dexterous in performing an action, so as to escape notice

  3. Done with, and marked by, artful and dexterous secrecy; subtle

    a sly trick

  4. Light or delicate; slight; thin.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English sly, sley, sleigh, sleiȝ, from Old Norse slǿgr (“sly, cunning”, literally “capable of hitting or striking”), from Proto-Germanic *slōgiz (“lively, agile, cunning, sly, striking”), from Proto-Indo-European *slak- (“to hit, throw”). Cognate with Icelandic slægur (“crafty, sly”), Norwegian Nynorsk sløg (“sly”). Related to sleight, slay. In all likelihood, however, unrelated with Saterland Frisian slau (“sly, crafty”), Dutch sluw (“sly, cunning”), Low German slu (“sly, cunning”), German schlau (“clever, crafty”). Doublet of sleight and slöjd

adv/slaɪ/

  1. Slyly.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English sly, sley, sleigh, sleiȝ, from Old Norse slǿgr (“sly, cunning”, literally “capable of hitting or striking”), from Proto-Germanic *slōgiz (“lively, agile, cunning, sly, striking”), from Proto-Indo-European *slak- (“to hit, throw”). Cognate with Icelandic slægur (“crafty, sly”), Norwegian Nynorsk sløg (“sly”). Related to sleight, slay. In all likelihood, however, unrelated with Saterland Frisian slau (“sly, crafty”), Dutch sluw (“sly, cunning”), Low German slu (“sly, cunning”), German schlau (“clever, crafty”). Doublet of sleight and slöjd

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.