sly

There is, however, one dazzlingly strange interlude of repressed conflict that radiates such retro 1950s-fixated weirdness that it’s as if David Lynch took a sly pass at the “Mad Max” universe.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 27, 2026

Except her version of fun involves vengeance, sly righteousness and the exposure of humanity’s darker tendencies.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 15, 2026

You have to be clever, not sly, in how you deal with it.

From BBC ● May 8, 2026

“The long and winding road is more than a song,” he sings, with a sly wink to his Beatles past.

From Salon ● Apr. 24, 2026

This was one sly bunch of fairies, hanging around for God knows how many millennia and still not one photo, not one frame of video.

From "Artemis Fowl" by Eoin Colfer

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Payton took a slyer approach, employing strategies of escalation.

From New York Times ● Dec. 15, 2011

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

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

"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

Since then, he’s succeeded by preserving some of that same immediacy in more polished environs, as on “Stitches,” one of last year’s slyest and most effective pop songs.

From New York Times ● Jun. 17, 2016

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

All which Crabstick knew, and would often declare her missus to be "of all missuses the most slyest and least come-at-able."

From The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope