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

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

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

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

Then, at his busiest, with a wife and three children impatiently waiting at home, he wheedled Mel Brooks for a cameo in “Young Frankenstein.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 28, 2025

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

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

As someone who wheedled his grandmother into taking him to see Hitchcock’s “Frenzy” at age 13, I can both relate, and think I have him beat in the awkwardness department.

From New York Times ● Aug. 24, 2018

The Americans were wheedled and teased over to those three stacks, which weren’t hay after all.

From "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut

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

And certainly Marvel’s vocal characterization of the deteriorating Mary — lilting then wheedling then ratlike then hollow — is one you will not soon get out of your head.

From New York Times ● Jan. 25, 2022

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

In her dealings with him she was very bossy and businesslike, treating him in much the same way she handled her kindergarten pupils; he responded in kind, alternately wheedling, affectionate, or sulky.

From "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt