(v. t.) To delude by guile, artifice, or craft; to deceive or impose on, as by a false statement; to lure.
(v. t.) To elude, or evade by craft; to foil.
(v. t.) To cause the time of to pass without notice; to relieve the tedium or weariness of; to while away; to divert.
Example Sentences:
(1) He is fond of recalling what the late Labour leader John Smith told him the last time he appeared on his show - "You have a way of asking beguiling questions with potentially lethal consequences."
(2) Ancient towns and wooded hillsides looked gorgeous reflected in the blue water, but we were beguiled just as much by the people.
(3) Shotton's Agent Provocateur story is a beguiling one.
(4) In his speech, watched by grandees such as the former party leader Lord Ashdown, who was Clegg’s original mentor, he said: “It is clear that in constituency after constituency north of the border, the beguiling appeal of Scottish nationalism has swept all before it, and south of the border a fear of what that means for the United Kingdom has strengthened English conservatism too.
(5) Situated on the road to Nazareth amid the beguiling beauty of the hills of northern Israel, the town is home to the family of Tomer Hemed, Brighton’s principal striker and a big threat to Boro’s dreams.
(6) The downside of this approach is the abiding and beguiling folly – so topical in the centenary year of the first world war – of thinking there is an off-the-peg solution from yesterday sitting on a shelf somewhere that can deal with the instabilities of today and tomorrow.
(7) But for those after something more off-track, or who balk at the $750 gorilla-tracking permit fee, the chimpanzees of Nyungwe are a beguiling alternative.
(8) More shocking still was the sight of an entire industry systematically pulling young people into their glittering and beguiling world – with little care for the collateral damage.
(9) "He was a children's entertainer and they were beguiled by his singing and painting.
(10) Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian With the beguiling hand of an architectural alchemist, Wilson has sliced a great circle out of a concrete facade in Liverpool and set it spinning.
(11) Others think their one-time champion Hague has been beguiled by Europeanist mandarins at the Foreign Office.
(12) United, however, have rarely impressed this season, with their failings illuminated by the contrast with a beguiling Arsenal.
(13) In the months since their formation, the eight members of Pussy Riot have perfected their own form of protest: their songs are pithy, angry missives, largely directed at Putin, and they remain beguilingly anonymous – the band wear neon balaclavas to conceal their identities and perform flash gigs in unexpected places: on public transport, for example, and, once, on a prison roof.
(14) This chunky combination of adventure game and Lego construction set has beguiled players for over two years, without a multimillion-dollar development budget, or blanket advertising.
(15) Nancy's novels and Jessica's memoirs offered a beguiling - and friends thought - inaccurate picture of the extraordinary life lived out chez Mitford under the irascible gaze of Lord Redesdale ("Uncle Matthew" in Love in a Cold Climate), celebrated for his dislike of foreigners and his daughters' friends, disparaged collectively as "sewers".
(16) One reason why the arguments for Brexit are so beguiling is because it’s easy to imagine an alternative world where some of the current laws of economics or politics don’t apply.
(17) While regulators chisel inconsequentially at the beguiling monoliths of private power that configure today’s information flows and dams, we the citizens have been reduced to raw material – sourced, bartered and mined in a curiously fabricated “privatised commons” of data and surveillance.
(18) Those new to Paper were beguiled, wondering what the queen of reality TV, gossip talkshows and social media was doing on the cover of a publication they had never heard of.
(19) In his speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow, the deputy prime minister said the Ukip and SNP leaders are making “seductive and beguiling” offers that are no more than a “counsel of despair”.
(20) In 2015 Labour’s Andy Burnham is offering the equally beguiling vision of “whole person care”.
Cunning
Definition:
(a.) Knowing; skillful; dexterous.
(a.) Wrought with, or exhibiting, skill or ingenuity; ingenious; curious; as, cunning work.
(a.) Crafty; sly; artful; designing; deceitful.
(a.) Pretty or pleasing; as, a cunning little boy.
(a.) Knowledge; art; skill; dexterity.
(a.) The faculty or act of using stratagem to accomplish a purpose; fraudulent skill or dexterity; deceit; craft.
Example Sentences:
(1) But the Franco-British spat sparked by Dave's rejection of Angela and Nicolas's cunning plan to save the euro has been given wings by news the US credit agencies may soon strip France of its triple-A rating and is coming along very nicely, thank you. "
(2) According to his blog, he's been acting on the advice of a friend and pursuing a course of "silence, exile and cunning", but I'm not sure a couple of years of not giving interviews to Heat qualifies.
(3) "They are alert, cunning and devious individuals who have current knowledge of investigative methods and techniques which may be used against them," said an internal report.
(4) 3.16pm BST Myners explains that his solution is a PLC-plus board -- a highly qualified board, holding the executive to account, complemented by a national council who is charged with checking that the board is doing what it should ( acting like shareholders, effectively ) He denies that it's a cunning plan to get his friends onto the Co-op board.
(5) The SNP minority government at Holyrood after 2007 survived from day to day by cunning deals that played the other parties off against one another.
(6) In fact, not only have the teams that failed to qualify not been invited to play, for if they were that would contradict the elitist terms of the qualification that are disavowed so cunningly here by Pitbull, but also in reality, only Fifa functionaries, Brazilian bureaucrats and half the BBC will get into Brazil's stadiums gratis this summer.
(7) The capacity of urea-N synthesis (CUNS), the galactose elimination capacity (GEC) and the antipyrine clearance (APC) were measured in rats immediately after 30, 70 and 90% partial hepatectomy and after sham operation.
(8) 1980 was his best year for opera: the Cologne company (whose music director, John Pritchard, became a staunch supporter) brought Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte and Cimarosa's Il Matrimonio Segreto, Glasgow provided Berg's Wozzeck and Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen, and the festival itself produced a distinguished world premiere in Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse.
(9) In it she explains how she scratched the graffito "My French teacher is a cun-" on a door, and was stopped just as she finished that crucial "t".)
(10) Putin is a cunning negotiator with the skills of a KGB colonel, varying between brute force, charm and obfuscation.
(11) He added that the core message from Pyongyang was that South Korea’s National Intelligence Service was using the reptiles “as part of a ‘cunning scheme’ to challenge our unity”.
(12) It needed stamina, ice-in-the-veins bravery, cunning, cool judgment and brute determination.
(13) So much so that he ends the press conference with the point, and has a little smile at his own cunning.
(14) Running at the visiting defence, N’Doye produced a cunning disguise pass that the Croat Jelavic took in his stride and dispatched past Brad Guzan via a looping deflection.
(15) Only Eurovision could offer up such a song: a plea for ethnic tolerance, cunningly disguised as an Abba track with the offcuts from a pantomime.
(16) Anyway, back to these fraudsters, who are the least costly element of a leaky system, but nevertheless transfix the political imagination as though they were masterminds of cunning and audacity, whose long game were to destroy the fabric of society altogether.
(17) Steve Hilton's cunning plan to abolish all consumer, employment and maternity rights got a dusty answer, while his green passions are at least tolerated.
(18) Former schemes were tiny but this one is mammoth, the debt kept cunningly off the public borrowing books (which the Office for National Statistics allowed; it's said the Treasury was amazed).
(19) It turned out that the Square Mile is cunningly designed so as to have almost nowhere for such groups to gather, so the protesters ended up by the skirts of St Paul's.
(20) Undercover underwear What do you do when you develop a cunning remote-monitoring system to track soldiers’ performance in the field, but they don’t want to wear a clumsy chest strap, or forget to wear the wristband?