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

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

And by clicking on that link, you’ll either download malware onto your device or be taken to a site that tries to wheedle sensitive personal information out of you.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 22, 2022

The more other people sit stone-faced, the more I turn into a clown, trying to wheedle just little bit of encouraging energy back from them.

From Slate ● Feb. 26, 2022

When the agent continued to wheedle her, Mama hung up on her.

From "The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street" by Karina Yan Glaser

The man, 56-year-old Wu Zhiqing, complains about the quality of the mushrooms; she wheedles back in response.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 12, 2026

“Because of your big career that’s so much bigger than mine?” wheedles her petulant husband.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 20, 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

But once in a while, Prim wheedles one out of me.

From "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins

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

Equipped with two $4,000 trackers — which he’d wheedled a company into donating — Clerkin went out with a fishing captain who said he’d seen megamouths roaming.

From Washington Post ● Oct. 11, 2021

Through frequent phone calls and golf games, Shinzo Abe had supposedly wheedled his way into one of the closest relationships with Trump of any world leader.

From Slate ● Sep. 18, 2018

“Come on,” wheedled his father with a smile, “there must be something.”

From "Shooting Kabul" by N. H. Senzai

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

So she enlisted Yala, at the time still an undergrad, who set out on the laborious door-to-door task of wheedling for access to anonymous mammograms.

From Seattle Times ● Dec. 21, 2021

His wheedling and complaining follow me until I’m out of earshot.

From "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen