What's the difference between cunning and quaint?

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?

Quaint


Definition:

  • (a.) Prudent; wise; hence, crafty; artful; wily.
  • (a.) Characterized by ingenuity or art; finely fashioned; skillfully wrought; elegant; graceful; nice; neat.
  • (a.) Curious and fanciful; affected; odd; whimsical; antique; archaic; singular; unusual; as, quaint architecture; a quaint expression.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Once availed of the fallacy that athletes are role models, there’s a certain purity that feels almost quaint in an era of athlete as brand.
  • (2) That merriment is not just tankards and quaintness and mimsy Morris dancing, but a witty, angry and tender fire at the centre of Englishness.
  • (3) From the quaint market towns to the rolling countryside, this county is one of the many jewels in Great Britain’s crown,” he said.
  • (4) At the advent of the web, Yahoo quaintly believed it could use editors to catalogue all the content online, but quickly learned that that wouldn't scale, as we say these days.
  • (5) John Howard livened up the morning by observing that Tony Abbott's knights and dames initiative was so quaintly olde world that not even he would have gone there.
  • (6) He knew that if he backed away from calling an election, he'd be accused of turning 'frit' - to use that quaint old Lincolnshire word of Margaret Thatcher's - in the face of the opinion polls and a resurgent Conservative party.
  • (7) Photograph: Alamy With no fewer than four beaches to choose from and a quaint town centre of ice-cream coloured houses and shops, Tenby is an appealing spot for a day at the seaside.
  • (8) At that time X----- itself was untouched by shot and shell, the old houses in the square with their quaint red-tiled roofs, irregular as peaks of a sierra, and their higgledy-piggledy doors and windows, were as yet intact.
  • (9) Port Gaverne , a little cove near Port Isaac always described as "quaint", is a good place to watch seals (and occasional basking sharks, dolphins and porpoises), go fishing or rummage in rock pools.
  • (10) Quaintly, his second album still riffs on the idea of tertiary education (his first was The College Dropout ).
  • (11) The problem with news is not a quaint moral cowardice.
  • (12) The only other person Drake ever wrote a song for was, bizarrely enough, Millie, of My Boy Lollipop, who recorded a reggae song of his called May Fair, one of those “quaint” pieces of observation – a rich lady getting in a chauffeured limousine while a tramp ambles past at the exact same moment.
  • (13) Gillard occupied the office she quaintly terms the gumnut room.
  • (14) "Nursing" as a verb, like adjudge, is one of football's more quaint usages that we should do more to encourage.
  • (15) The online world is sunlit and quaint, with a jolly host called Papa, who, when they enter, offers his guests a little girl.
  • (16) In Alain's work, the mixture of graceful, sometimes slightly quaint French, Congolese rhythm and Parisian street slang is very complex, but it is a complexity achieved by him as a writer.
  • (17) Quaint language and interesting historical associations are no justification for preserving obsolete statutes in a mummified state.
  • (18) This will leave the court divided four to four, paralyzed, in all probability, which is clearly nothing that perturbs these persons still quaintly referred to as lawmakers.
  • (19) Its quaint name makes you wonder if pupils practise deportment and learn the correct way to address younger sons of dukes.
  • (20) At the school gate, the other women looked somehow quaint.