wheedle

A mosquito spots the eminent man and zooms over to wheedle in his ear, but Bashō remains immobile.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2025

He’s always looking to learn something, whether it’s from someone or just the cracks in their armor or the information he can wheedle out of somebody.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 15, 2025

The arsonists wheedle their way into his house with a combination of servile pleading, subtle bullying and appeals to Biedermann’s moral vanity.

From Seattle Times ● Dec. 14, 2022

Leibovich is, more subtly, a brilliant interviewer able to wheedle not-quite-admissions from his subjects, who give him all the access in the world.

From Washington Post ● Jul. 10, 2022

He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle, and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could.

From "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller

For one thing, “very” is a fraud, masquerading as a strengthener when it merely wheedles and pleads.

From Washington Post ● Oct. 12, 2022

“At least we tried to make a movie. They can’t judge us for that,” wheedles director Darren at the end of the film, incorrectly.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 2, 2022

He jokes and wheedles and begs and tells stories and pledges his troth.

From The New Yorker ● Jun. 3, 2019

THE young woman with the microphone cajoles, hectors and wheedles customers with the breathless enthusiasm of a livestock auctioneer at a county fair.

From Economist ● Jul. 18, 2017

But the brook always whines and wheedles: “Don’t go, Ida B, don’t go. Nobody’s callin’ and they can wait, anyway.

From "Ida B" by Katherine Hannigan

Ask any nerd who wheedled her parents for a little more cash to buy books: What you get from Scholastic is what your parents are willing to buy you.

From Salon ● Oct. 23, 2023

He wheedled money from the city for more cops, more police stations, more equipment, and he made nice with community organizations.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 30, 2023

And so, in a Rite Aid staff bathroom I’d wheedled my way into by citing my pregnancy, I discovered that my trickle of blood had turned into a torrent.

From Slate ● Oct. 2, 2020

It’s a fascinating vignette, but we never learn her real name, or what happened to her, or how she wheedled those secrets from Nazi submariners, or how useful her intel proved to Alliance and MI6.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 5, 2019

“Please, Mummy,” the girl wheedled, like she hadn’t heard me.

From "The Bridge Home" by Padma Venkatraman

Scientists had not yet discovered vitamins, so families did not fret about dietary “balance,” and there seems to have been little or none of the parental wheedling common today.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 20, 2026

“Part Two” shows Durst wheedling his friends to do his bidding from behind bars and expecting nothing less than absolute allegiance.

From Salon ● Apr. 21, 2024

Hunter Biden is such a stingy, wheedling, dishonest, self-serving dirtbag that even after the court-ordered paternity test proved the child was his, he refuses to acknowledge his own biological daughter.

From Washington Times ● Apr. 27, 2023

Finally, bravo to Seattle Opera’s indispensable Jonathan Dean, who translates and writes the supertitles projected above the stage, for having one of the wheedling stepsisters calling her prey “Princykins.”

From Seattle Times ● Oct. 21, 2019

She had a face like a dinner roll and blancmange-colored skin, and ruled by wheedling.

From "Cat's Eye" by Margaret Atwood