(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?
Devious
Definition:
(a.) Out of a straight line; winding; varying from directness; as, a devious path or way.
(a.) Going out of the right or common course; going astray; erring; wandering; as, a devious step.
Example Sentences:
(1) Cholecystectomy provided successful treatment in three of the four patients but the fourth was too ill to undergo an operation; in general, definitive treatment is cholecystectomy, together with excision of the fistulous tract if this takes a direct path through the abdominal wall from the gallbladder, or curettage if the course is devious.
(2) He told the court: “We have been trying at the bar to imagine whether we can think of any other group of legal or natural persons, terrorist suspects, arms dealers, Jews, in respect of whose evidence one might even begin to think that one could tenably say, ‘Well, of course, in looking at this evidence I have been very careful because I know from the past that these people are a bit devious and a bit unworthy, and the only thing they’re really interested in is subverting public health.’ ” Yet last week’s judgment, running to 1,000 paragraphs, confirmed in excoriating detail just how determined big tobacco has been down the decades to achieve precisely this goal.
(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) In the interim, Gough had also played a devious old friend of the Doctor – by now, Peter Davison – in the 1983 story Arc of Infinity.
(5) Ideally they should also possess the sort of clipped tones that make vulgarities sound like Virgil and the sort of wardrobe that dresses up deviousness as a gentleman's sport.
(6) You're a devious villain conducting the perfect crime, like the dashing guest star in the opening scene of a classic Columbo.
(7) This is in part due to planned obsolescence – a devious ploy by manufacturers bolstered by marketing strategies to make us fall out of love with a product hastily.
(8) In the maximum likelihood (ML) method for estimating a molecular phylogenetic tree, the pattern of nucleotide substitutions for computing likelihood values is assumed to be simpler than that of the actual evolutionary process, simply because the process, considered to be quite devious, is unknown.
(9) But all of these arguments, Anderson implied, fell on deaf ears because of what he called the “myth of tobacco exceptionalism” – the view that manufacturers are “uniquely devious”.
(10) "While millions of working people are either without work, or having their pay frozen or slashed, Britain's boardrooms are finding even more devious ways to squeeze even more cash from their companies," said the general secretary, Len McCluskey.
(11) But, at heart, Harper’s team are not that different from politicians across the developed world who have discovered that democracy is a pretty sweet theory but that, in reality, if you want to get hold of power and use it, there are all kinds of devious moves available that have very little to do with that antique idea.
(12) These presentations of the devious ease with which the Vatican dissembles also clearly serve as a metaphor for the Catholic church’s unwillingness to address the scandals of priestly paedophilia.
(13) They can change their name but it’s the same thing – if people are wise, they will see it is the devious politics of the hard left.” In response to complaints about the email, a Corbyn campaign spokesman said: “At this crucial time for our party and our country, it is essential that we bring Labour together.
(14) During the trial's closing arguments Donald's lawyer, Max Blecher, accused Shelly of an "unconscionable", "devious" and "invidious" scheme to strip him of the Clippers.
(15) There aren’t enough Trotskyists, entryists, devious Tories and random renegades to explain such an overwhelming victory.
(16) The mining magnate says Brough, who is contesting former Speaker Peter Slipper's Sunshine Coast seat of Fisher, has been devious over the James Ashby affair.
(17) In the UK, the doughty chair of the public accounts committee, Margaret Hodge, investigating Google for tax avoidance has denounced the firm as "devious", "calculating … and manipulating".
(18) The 12 Years a Slave star is perhaps Lee’s most high-profile find , but others who have found success from the Showcases include Randall Park who stars in the upcoming series Fresh off the Boat, as well as Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams, Chadwick Boseman (42) and Dania Ramirez (Devious Maids).
(19) The book described Charles’s court as so riven by infighting that it is known by insiders as “Wolf Hall”, after Hilary Mantel’s fictional portrayal of Thomas Cromwell’s devious machinations on behalf of King Henry VIII.
(20) The model stipulates that given exposure to sustained aversive maternal control and a maternal communication style which is subtle and devious, the child comes to adapt with approach, stratagem-based behaviours and heightened vigilance for evaluative information (i.e.