sly

There is a lot to love in Jane Austen: The wit, the gentility, the portraiture, the sly social observation, the romance.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2026

We get both a tantalizing armchair mystery steeped in occult-ish authenticity, but also a sly commentary on our own relationship to the pursuit of curiosity.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 2, 2026

However, with a sly smile Kennedy confesses that her granny "would have been absolutely tickled pink to think of Gillian Anderson playing her".

From BBC ● Sep. 24, 2026

The Wachtell report also does a sly job of establishing what we all kind of knew: these Leonard deals never made much sense.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 3, 2026

“That sly old Bull Sparra has taken them with him.”

From "Redwall" by Brian Jacques

But I began to suspect he was up to something slier in the course of this 800-plus-page doorstopper.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 2, 2021

Julia understands digital media—and print media, for that matter—as well as anyone I’ve ever met, and every day she made the Slate we were editing together slier and fresher and more fun.

From Slate ● Oct. 26, 2018

It’s only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.

From "Cat's Eye" by Margaret Atwood

The hungry thousands that crowded and pushed at Willard's thought him one of them, only deeper and slier.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861 by Various

He had a Sompnour ready to his hand, A slier boy was none in Engleland; For subtlely he had his espiaille,* *espionage That taught him well where it might aught avail.

From The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems by D. Laing Purves

One of the slyer jokes in “No Sudden Move,” Steven Soderbergh’s smart, insouciantly twisty thriller set in 1954 Detroit, is how little some of its characters know about cars.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 30, 2021

And other late-night hosts also frankly and straightforwardly used the word on Monday, which was refreshing—though some were slyer about its usage than others.

From Slate ● Jul. 30, 2019

Humor in the later stories, while seldom entirely absent, is slyer and quicker.

From New York Times ● Nov. 23, 2016

They don’t do so as self-righteous scolds or as stuffed shirts; they’re slyer than that, more entertaining.

From Salon ● Jul. 25, 2012

He laughs again, and the nasty laugh admits I’m slyer than he guessed.

From "Grendel" by John Gardner

One of the last performances I saw in 2017 was one of the sliest: Billy Crudup in David Cale’s “Harry Clarke” at New York’s Vineyard Theatre.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 16, 2018

"Will my learned friend," said Mr. P —— with one of his sliest sneers, "inform us what motive the defendant could possibly have to keep back a witness so necessary to him?"

From The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney by Samuel Warren

The sliest old thief that you ever did see; Hi, ho, see the chips fly!

From The Adventures of Unc' Billy Possum by Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo) Burgess

Still, even through the layers of our contemporary hindsight, the slyest moments of Weinberger’s score make a convincing argument for the piece.

From New York Times ● Nov. 12, 2020

Peter Debruge in Variety noted "of all the satirists working in cinema today, Östlund displays perhaps the slyest streak of dark humor."

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 3, 2014

I’d just marry whichever girl flaunted—over the course of several rec-hall dances and town-square picnics—the slyest wit and the cutest smile.

From Slate ● Feb. 1, 2013

Where the network’s “True Detective” occasionally broke its dolefulness with the slyest, philosophically artful wink at an audience riveted by its mystery, “The Leftovers” grafts more unhappiness onto unhappiness.

From Washington Post

It's the slyest trick the old fox has ever tried to play on us.

From A Man of the People A Drama of Abraham Lincoln by Thomas Dixon