toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

beguile
in a sentence

show 188 more with this conextual meaning
  • But Timur is wildly sociable, his faults forever absolved by good humor, a determined friendliness, and a beguiling air of innocence that endears him to people he meets.†   (source)
  • In thirty years of rummaging through cities for characters, I've never met one as beguiling or maddening.†   (source)
  • On certain nights the moonlight had flooded through his dormer window and bathed everything in blue, beguiling shadows that prevented him from sleeping.†   (source)
  • In a dull, Hat voice-to show I was not beguiled by his good looks or his family photograph-I told Doctor Gordon about not sleeping and not eating and not reading.†   (source)
  • Children from poor homes often find themselves beguiled by a host of new temptations when suddenly confronted by great wealth.†   (source)
  • No thought could exist in the throbbing that surrounded them, only an upwelling of emotion that the drums expertly beguiled, summoning tears and bittersweet joy at the same time.†   (source)
  • Maybe that was why she refused to let guys touch her and instead kept them beguiled with her wit and charm: knowing how guys could not resist an intimate smile or gentle flattery.†   (source)
  • Clara just smiled, her old beguiling smile.†   (source)
  • He stopped struggling for a moment to gaze up into Yossarian's face through the crack in the door with what he must have supposed was a beguiling smile.†   (source)
  • I find myself thinking about Mrs. Fauxmanteur and the beguiling Laura almost to the point of torment.†   (source)
  • Fermat's theorem was a beguilingly simple task.†   (source)
  • Harry can be a beguiling one, no doubt.†   (source)
  • But Billy Pilgrim wasn't beguiled by the back of the store.†   (source)
  • The man was full of beguiling influence that unnerved him.†   (source)
  • But to me, Charleston is a dark city, a melancholy city, whose severe covenants and secrets are as powerful and beguiling as its elegance, whose demons dance their alley dances and compose their malign hymns to the side of the moon I cannot see.†   (source)
  • He was almost as startled as she, not by her entrance but, rather, by her beguiling appearance.†   (source)
  • Her eyes, she had decided, were her most alluring asset, wide, dark, intelligent, beguiling, with a trace of treachery and perhaps some hidden reservoir of pain.†   (source)
  • It was the great blue American sky, beguiling the grass upward.†   (source)
  • A baby's smile, beguiling and meaningless.†   (source)
  • European women often boss their men too, but with a beguiling subtlety unknown to most American females.†   (source)
  • VLADIMIR: All I know is that the hours are long, under these conditions, and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which –how shall I say– whichmay at first sight seem reasonable, until they become a habit.†   (source)
  • It was a beguiling idea.†   (source)
  • But she was not yet quite sure what she meant; and of all the times to become beguiled by such a matter, to try to argue it, or warn about it!†   (source)
  • But on the rare occasions when he smiles without sneering, his personality possesses the remnant of a humorous, romantic, irresponsible Irish charm — that of the beguiling ne'er-do-well, with a strain of the sentimentally poetic, attractive to women and popular with men.†   (source)
  • Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker's-book, went home to bed.   (source)
    beguiled = was entertained for
  • And at table seven was none other than the beguiling Anna Urbanova in the company of the beguiled.†   (source)
  • That is, she did until a young man came to her door and beguiled her with words of love.†   (source)
  • She appeared to be a few years older than Kassad, perhaps in her late twenties, but this fact barely registered as she continued staring into his face with those soft, beguiling, endlessly deep eyes.†   (source)
  • "I reckon he's beguiled her.†   (source)
  • They thought that the hills in the distance and the shadows before them, the feathery lines of fire in the fields, the moon, and the mysterious and beguiling songbirds that rose from thickets and trees, and hovered like black sunlight, would stay with them forever.†   (source)
  • The girl had spent a goodly portion of the night talking with the dragons, beguiling them as only she could.†   (source)
  • Each of two orchestras was playing a different Csardas, one that sounded Turkish and one that sounded right, until Strassnitzky got up from his table and unified them, physically and musically, so they might play the beguiling waltzes of which his capital and his kind were so profoundly fond.†   (source)
  • The sound of it caused her skin to prickle; his words seemed to wash over her like warm waves of water, caressing her, beguiling her, binding her.†   (source)
  • Your youth, I suppose, that wonderful flexibility of your age that allows you to be beguiled by, rather than devoured by, this octopus of a city.†   (source)
  • He bought her fine clothes (including the droll and beguiling . matching "costumes" I first saw them dressed in), rings, earrings, bracelets, bangles, beads.†   (source)
  • …man who possessed so many literary references and allusions, both classical and modern, and who within the space of an hour could, with no gratuitous strain, weave together Lytton Strachey, Alice in Wonderland, Martin Luther's early celibacy, A Midsummer Night's Dream and the mating habits of the Sumatran orangutan into a little jewel box of a beguiling lecture which facetiously but with a serious overtone explored the intertwined nature of sexual voyeurism and exhibitionism.†   (source)
  • …disconsolate, largely inscrutable mystery of her race; and then later I experienced a grander empathy with Jewish folk which, I am persuaded, is chiefly available to those Southerners shattered for years and years by rock-hard encounter with the anguish of Abraham and Moses' stupendous quest and the Psalmist's troubled hosannas and the abyssal vision of Daniel and all the other revelations, bittersweet confections, tall tales and beguiling horrors of the Protestant/Jewish Bible.†   (source)
  • Besides, I was quite simply devoted to Nathan, at least to that beguiling, generous, life-enhancing Nathan who had shed his entourage of demons—and since it was this Nathan who had returned to us, a Nathan rather drawn and pale but seemingly purged of whatever horrors had possessed him on that recent evening, the reborn warmth and brotherly affection I felt was wonderful; my delight could only have been surpassed by the response of Sophie, whose joy was a form of barely controlled…†   (source)
  • Her stomach gurgled in fear—fear not of the Commandant himself but of failure of nerve, fear that she would ultimately lack the craft, the power of improvisation, the subtlety of manner, the histrionic gift, at last the beguiling convincingness by which she so desperately yearned to maneuver him into a vulnerable position and thus perhaps bend him to serve the modest demands of her will.†   (source)
  • And donot think you can beguile me with honeyed words.†   (source)
  • Were it anyone else outside the gates, I might hope to beguile him.†   (source)
  • He let the dwarf beguile him with that glib tongue of his.†   (source)
  • And so this fresh American experience with its hint of bucolic beguilements gave her a thrill of joy and anticipation keener than any of its kind since those childhood summers when the train chuffed out from the Cracow station toward Vienna and the Alto Adige and the swirling mists of the Dolomites.†   (source)
  • Beguiled by the mildness of noon, he had left the house wearing only his thin blue jersey.†   (source)
  • The Nolan men grew handsomer, weaker and more beguiling with each generation.†   (source)
  • They almost forgot about eleven o'clock, the mud pie making was so beguiling.†   (source)
  • It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter's night.†   (source)
  • He had been afraid that she would attack him, would lay her poor snares before him—snares which would be all the more pitifully beguiling because of their poverty.†   (source)
  • His free lunch was no better than theirs and there was no beguiling entertainment other than that spontaneously contributed by his customers.†   (source)
  • She rushed out to the delicatessen store and beguiled the man into letting her open a charge account until Saturday payday.†   (source)
  • They beguiled the time by backbiting and intriguing against each other in a foolish kind of way.†   (source)
  • For by the "she" of Lucetta's story Elizabeth had not been beguiled.†   (source)
  • Newman listened to her with an attention at once beguiled and irritated.†   (source)
  • If Dr. Kenn should be beguiled into marrying that Miss Tulliver!†   (source)
  • A dense justice in a corner is beguiled into a wink.†   (source)
  • MARGARET (returning home) How scornfully I once reviled, When some poor maiden was beguiled!†   (source)
  • By and by I made another diversion, and beguiled her to sketch her story.†   (source)
  • But spruce groves are seductive and yellow nuts of gum beguiling; they picked and loitered and strayed; and as usual the first thing that recalled them to a sense of the flight of time was Jimmy Glover shouting from the top of a patriarchal old spruce "Master's coming."†   (source)
  • Thoughts did, indeed, enter it, but only on the condition that they left behind them every element of beauty, or even of quaintness, by which I might have been distracted or beguiled.†   (source)
  • How could I have been so beguiled?†   (source)
  • Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours; precisely thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir Launcelot in the pleached alley.†   (source)
  • Seemingly he was well pleased, and he must certainly have judged us out of ear-shot of all our enemies; for throughout the rest of our night-march he beguiled the way with whistling of many tunes, warlike, merry, plaintive; reel tunes that made the foot go faster; tunes of my own south country that made me fain to be home from my adventures; and all these, on the great, dark, desert mountains, making company upon the way.†   (source)
  • She stroked his hair, and he had to look pleased under that touch, the more demanding in its beguiling softness.†   (source)
  • The thought of launching such a missile as Mrs. Hatch at the perfidious bosom of society was not without its charm: Miss Bart had even beguiled her leisure with visions of the fair Norma introduced for the first time to a family banquet at the Van Osburghs'.†   (source)
  • …deftly doing his work, after time had done its, or when he stood at his balcony door and cut his nails with the shears and file he had taken from a pretty velvet etui, he was suddenly overcome with the old dizziness that was mixed with a scary sense of curious delight, an ambiguous dizziness that made him feel not only unsteady, but also beguiled by his whirling inability to differentiate between "still" and "again," out of whose blurred jumble emerge the timeless "always" and "ever."†   (source)
  • …crimson peonies; white, fragrant narcissi and thorny, sweet Scotch roses; pink and blue and white columbines and lilac-tinted Bouncing Bets; clumps of southernwood and ribbon grass and mint; purple Adam-and-Eve, daffodils, and masses of sweet clover white with its delicate, fragrant, feathery sprays; scarlet lightning that shot its fiery lances over prim white musk-flowers; a garden it was where sunshine lingered and bees hummed, and winds, beguiled into loitering, purred and rustled.†   (source)
  • This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations.†   (source)
  • How much we love him—as at that moment I loved Francoise—the good-natured intermediary who by a single word has made supportable, human, almost propitious the inconceivable, infernal scene of gaiety in the thick of which we had been imagining swarms of enemies, perverse and seductive, beguiling away from us, even making laugh at us, the woman whom we love.†   (source)
  • My perambulations had given me, meanwhile, no glimpse of him, but they had tended to make more public the change taking place in our relation as a consequence of his having at the piano, the day before, kept me, in Flora's interest, so beguiled and befooled.†   (source)
  • Then the ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore— Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"†   (source)
  • My son inquired to what species of the monkey tribe I thought his protege belonged, which led to a good deal of talk on the subject, and conversation beguiling the way, we found ourselves ere long on the rocky margin of the stream and close to the rest of our party.†   (source)
  • Beguiling the time with these pleasant reflections, Mr. Fagin wended his way, through mud and mire, to his gloomy abode: where the Dodger was sitting up, impatiently awaiting his return.†   (source)
  • She was an angel beguiled.†   (source)
  • After all, I believe the wisest of us must be beguiled in this way sometimes, and must think both better and worse of people than they deserve.†   (source)
  • Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebe's capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of what he dreamed of doing in the world.†   (source)
  • We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine, and his company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling stars.†   (source)
  • Western travellers, who have beguiled the midnight hour in the interesting process of pulling down rail fences, to pry their carriages out of mud holes, will have a respectful and mournful sympathy with our unfortunate hero.†   (source)
  • These were his only known pastimes, but they had beguiled his hours for upwards of half a century, and they doubtless justified his frequent declaration that there was no place like Paris.†   (source)
  • Catherine told Hareton who she was, and where she was going; and asked him to show her the way: finally, beguiling him to accompany her.†   (source)
  • When they arrived on the open heath, where Gurth might have had some trouble in finding his road, the thieves guided him straight forward to the top of a little eminence, whence he could see, spread beneath him in the moonlight, the palisades of the lists, the glimmering pavilions pitched at either end, with the pennons which adorned them fluttering in the moonbeams, and from which could be heard the hum of the song with which the sentinels were beguiling their night-watch.†   (source)
  • And in the morning's glare, and the evening's soft repose, the five sisters still walked, or worked, or beguiled the time by cheerful conversation, in their quiet orchard.†   (source)
  • On re-entering the cloister, the archdeacon found at the door of his cell his brother Jehan du Moulin, who was waiting for him, and who had beguiled the tedium of waiting by drawing on the wall with a bit of charcoal, a profile of his elder brother, enriched with a monstrous nose.†   (source)
  • All this Deerslayer well knew, for it was in relating the traditions of such scenes, as well as of the battles and victories of their people, that the old men beguiled the long winter evenings in their cabins.†   (source)
  • As the omnibus contained only one other passenger, a sleepy old lady, Amy pocketed her veil and beguiled the tedium of the way by trying to find out where all her money had gone to.†   (source)
  • "I hear they are the most picturesque in the world"; and so she had a sudden interest for Hampstead, and Hornsey, and found that Dulwich had great charms for her, and getting her victim into her carriage, drove her to those rustic spots, beguiling the little journeys with conversations about Rawdon and his wife, and telling every story to the old lady which could add to her indignation against this pair of reprobates.†   (source)
  • So from its mother's breasts a child At first, reluctant, takes its food, But soon to seek them is beguiled.†   (source)
  • …hard to please,
    Fenced by form and ceremony,
    Decked by courtly rites and dress
    And etiquette of gentilesse.
    But when the mate of the snow and wind,
    He left each civil scale behind:
    Him wood-gods fed with honey wild
    And of his memory beguiled.
    In caves and hollow trees he crept
    And near the wolf and panther slept.
    He stood before the tumbling main
    With joy too tense for sober brain;
    He shared the life of the element,
    The tie of blood and home was rent:
    As if in him the…†   (source)
  • "Ev'n should I fall o'er the broken bridge passing, Or stray in the marshes, by false lights beguiled, Still will my Father, with promise and blessing, Take to His bosom the poor orphan child.†   (source)
  • Others, whose briefer span forbade their devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium of the way with penny-papers.†   (source)
  • With similar recollections Mrs Nickleby beguiled the tediousness of the way, until they reached the omnibus, which the extreme politeness of her new friends would not allow them to leave until it actually started, when they took their hats, as Mrs Nickleby solemnly assured her hearers on many subsequent occasions, 'completely off,' and kissed their straw-coloured kid gloves till they were no longer visible.†   (source)
  • And it was quite true that if Hetty had been plain, she would have looked very ugly and unamiable at that moment, and no one's moral judgment upon her would have been in the least beguiled.†   (source)
  • Mr. Cruncher beguiled the earlier watches of the night with solitary pipes, and did not start upon his excursion until nearly one o'clock.†   (source)
  • Phineas seemed, on the whole, the briskest of the company, and beguiled his long drive with whistling certain very unquaker-like songs, as he went on.†   (source)
  • They talked of many subjects (his partner never had had such a ready store to draw upon for the beguiling of the time), and so to bed, and to sleep.†   (source)
  • " But the Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door; Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore— What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore Meant in croaking "Nevermore."†   (source)
  • I've no doubt a great many women begin that way," said his lordship, who, be it averred, did not in the least believe in the axiom he thus beguiled his anxiety by uttering.†   (source)
  • We beguiled the way with arrangements concerning the letters that Richard was to write to me and the letters that I was to write to him and with a great many hopeful projects.†   (source)
  • He could half understand it: the good-humor, the good looks of elder and younger, and the provision for passing the time without any labor of intelligence, might make the house beguiling to people who had no particular use for their odd hours.†   (source)
  • As it was, in the five and a half months since fate had brought us on board, we had cleared 14,000 leagues, and over this track longer than the earth's equator, so many fascinating or frightening incidents had beguiled our voyage: that hunting trip in the Crespo forests, our running aground in the Torres Strait, the coral cemetery, the pearl fisheries of Ceylon, the Arabic tunnel, the fires of Santorini, those millions in the Bay of Vigo, Atlantis, the South Pole!†   (source)
  • There was no promise of happiness for her if she were beguiled into loving Stephen Guest; and this thought emboldened Philip to view his own love for her in the light of a less unequal offering.†   (source)
  • Earnshaw sat, morose as usual, at the chimney corner, and my little mistress was beguiling an idle hour with drawing pictures on the window-panes, varying her amusement by smothered bursts of songs, and whispered ejaculations, and quick glances of annoyance and impatience in the direction of her cousin, who steadfastly smoked, and looked into the grate.†   (source)
  • Many pleasant pictures of the life that I would lead there, and of the change for the better that would come over my character when I had a guiding spirit at my side whose simple faith and clear home wisdom I had proved, beguiled my way.†   (source)
  • Adam pictured to himself Mrs. Poyser examining it with her keen eye and trying in vain to find out a deficiency; and, of course, close to Mrs. Poyser stood Hetty, and Adam was again beguiled from calculations and contrivances into dreams and hopes.†   (source)
  • After breakfast, Catherine insisted on my bringing a chair and sitting with my work under the fir-trees at the end of the house; and she beguiled Hareton, who had perfectly recovered from his accident, to dig and arrange her little garden, which was shifted to that corner by the influence of Joseph's complaints.†   (source)
  • There was at least this fruit from all her years of striving after the highest and best,—that her soul though betrayed, beguiled, ensnared, could never deliberately consent to a choice of the lower.†   (source)
  • Then, the miserable bakers' shops were beset by long files of them, patiently waiting to buy bad bread; and while they waited with stomachs faint and empty, they beguiled the time by embracing one another on the triumphs of the day, and achieving them again in gossip.†   (source)
  • So Launcelot sailed to his Duchy of Guienne with his following, and Gawaine soon followed with an army, and he beguiled Arthur to go with him.†   (source)
  • In fact, much the same sort of movement and mixture went on in old England as we find in older Herodotus, who also, in telling what had been, thought it well to take a woman's lot for his starting-point; though Io, as a maiden apparently beguiled by attractive merchandise, was the reverse of Miss Brooke, and in this respect perhaps bore more resemblance to Rosamond Vincy, who had excellent taste in costume, with that nymph-like figure and pure blindness which give the largest range to…†   (source)
  • So vehement and overpowering was the force with which she spoke, that, for a season, Tom was beguiled even from the pain of his wounds, and, raising himself on one elbow, watched her as she paced restlessly up and down, her long black hair swaying heavily about her, as she moved.†   (source)
  • The projects with which she beguiled her illness, for little Esther's education, and little Esther's marriage, and even for her own old age as the grandmother of little Esther's little Esthers, was so prettily expressive of devotion to this pride of her life that I should be tempted to recall some of them but for the timely remembrance that I am getting on irregularly as it is.†   (source)
  • Yielding to this fancy, and pleased to find that its indulgence beguiled the sick boy of many tedious hours, and never failed to afford him matter for thought and conversation afterwards, Nicholas made such spots the scenes of their daily rambles: driving him from place to place in a little pony-chair, and supporting him on his arm while they walked slowly among these old haunts, or lingered in the sunlight to take long parting looks of those which were most quiet and beautiful.†   (source)
  • The ladies of St. Ogg's were not beguiled by any wide speculative conceptions; but they had their favorite abstraction, called Society, which served to make their consciences perfectly easy in doing what satisfied their own egoism,—thinking and speaking the worst of Maggie Tulliver, and turning their backs upon her.†   (source)
  • …who was putting in some garden-seeds, and discoursed wisely with that rural sage about the crops that would make the most return on a perch of ground, and the result of sixty years' experience as to soils—namely, that if your soil was pretty mellow it would do, but if there came wet, wet, wet to make it all of a mummy, why then— Finding that the social spirit had beguiled her into being rather late, she dressed hastily and went over to the parsonage rather earlier than was necessary.†   (source)
  • A temporary bed was provided for her on the settle, near the fire; and, after a short time, she fell into a heavy slumber, with the child, who seemed no less weary, soundly sleeping on her arm; for the mother resisted, with nervous anxiety, the kindest attempts to take him from her; and, even in sleep, her arm encircled him with an unrelaxing clasp, as if she could not even then be beguiled of her vigilant hold.†   (source)
  • Well, said King Mark, yet shall he be beguiled.†   (source)
  • Then they all looked upon Sir Launcelot and said: Ye have beguiled us with your covered shield.†   (source)
  • Then when Sir Mordred wist and understood how he was beguiled, he was passing wroth out of measure.†   (source)
  • Hera beguiled him into making love.†   (source)
  • None of the gods of heaven is so to blame as my own mother, who beguiled me, lying, saying my end would come beneath Troy's wall from flashing arrows of Apollo.†   (source)
  • O boy, said Sir Gareth, thou hast beguiled me foul this day that thou kept my ring; give it me anon again, that I may hide my body withal; and so he took it him.†   (source)
  • Now, said Sir Gawaine, we have been served this day of what meats and drinks we thought on; but one thing beguiled us, we might not see the Holy Grail, it was so preciously covered.†   (source)
  • That me repenteth, said Launcelot, of your hurt, but I was adread of treason, for I was late beguiled, and therefore come on your way into your pavilion and take your rest, and as I suppose I shall staunch your blood.†   (source)
  • And then looking away absently, "Much to beguile-a Russian and a widower."†   (source)
  • You know how the old song goes: In this way and that, one beguiles the groom.†   (source)
  • As we walked, to beguile the dulness [of] innumerable winter walks we made up stories, long long stories that were taken up at the same place and added to each in turn.†   (source)
  • If you took this tic of his with the standard interpretation of meekness--well, there are types and habits that develop to beguile the experience of mankind.†   (source)
  • Beguiles!†   (source)
  • Beguiles!†   (source)
  • Pleasure him with sports, beguile him in wholesome ways, so that his health come again.†   (source)
  • 'tis not much, your Majesty, yet perchance it may beguile a short half-hour for want of a better.†   (source)
  • But Romans have tongues, and Jews, though ever so despised, have methods to beguile them.†   (source)
  • But there was no harm in his way of saying this: it was said laughingly, and to beguile the time.†   (source)
  • Ha, by Venus, my Flavius, thou didst beguile me!†   (source)
  • Prayers, tears, torturings of the flesh, all was vain to beguile that water to flow again.†   (source)
  • He tried to make it at once amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile the three coatless, beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.†   (source)
  • They would seek for something else—some malign, treacherous, deceiving power which, in the face of God's omniscience and omnipotence, still beguiles and betrays—and find it eventually in the error and perverseness of the human heart, which God has made, yet which He does not control, because He does not want to control it.†   (source)
  • Probably you are laughing at me and fitting those silly lines to my case— " 'Maybe sad Love upon his setting smiles, And with vain hopes his farewell hour beguiles.†   (source)
  • It would have been easy to get into a sad, wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied.†   (source)
  • This was true, Jude possessing a facility in that language which enabled him with great ease to himself to beguile his lonely walks by imaginary conversations therein.†   (source)
  • She let the lady Maecenases of her acquaintance beguile her into several of their Causes, and she enjoyed them as she had enjoyed her active and entirely purposeless war work in 1917, for Joyce Lanyon was to some degree an Arranger, which was an epithet invented by Terry Wickett for Capitola McGurk.†   (source)
  • Every evening I would beguile myself into imagining this letter, believing that I was actually reading it, reciting each of its sentences in turn.†   (source)
  • There was one among them which was a tall panel composed of a hundred little rectangular windows, of blue principally, like a great game of patience of the kind planned to beguile King Charles VI; but, either because a ray of sunlight had gleamed through it or because my own shifting vision had drawn across the window, whose colours died away and were rekindled by turns, a rare and transient fire—the next instant it had taken on all the iridescence of a peacock's tail, then shook and…†   (source)
  • She would beguile herself with a sudden suspicion that Francoise had been robbing her, that she had set a trap to make certain, and had caught her betrayer red-handed; and being in the habit, when she made up a game of cards by herself, of playing her own and her adversary's hands at once, she would first stammer out Francoise's awkward apologies, and then reply to them with such a fiery indignation that any of us who happened to intrude upon her at one of these moments would find her…†   (source)
  • At first with such discourse, and afterwards with conversation of a more general nature, did Mr. Wemmick and I beguile the time and the road, until he gave me to understand that we had arrived in the district of Walworth.†   (source)
  • We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were bound.†   (source)
  • Blanche Ingram, after having repelled, by supercilious taciturnity, some efforts of Mrs. Dent and Mrs. Eshton to draw her into conversation, had first murmured over some sentimental tunes and airs on the piano, and then, having fetched a novel from the library, had flung herself in haughty listlessness on a sofa, and prepared to beguile, by the spell of fiction, the tedious hours of absence.†   (source)
  • "Ah, then, I suppose you heard Haidee's guzla; the poor exile frequently beguiles a weary hour in playing over to me the airs of her native land."†   (source)
  • Beside the provisions lay the flute, whose notes had lately been called forth by the lonely watcher to beguile a tedious hour.†   (source)
  • Now by my faith I know well that he will grieve some of the court of King Arthur; for on him knights will be bold, and deem that it is I, and that will beguile them; and because of his armor and shield I am sure I shall ride in peace.†   (source)
  • Years passed away before the traditionary tale of the white maiden, and of the young warrior of the Mohicans ceased to beguile the long nights and tedious marches, or to animate their youthful and brave with a desire for vengeance.†   (source)
  • The latter part of the day turning out wet, they were fain to keep the house, look over Mr Meagles's collection, and beguile the time with conversation.†   (source)
  • Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own.†   (source)
  • The extraordinary intensity of his gaze seemed to attract it, beguile it, and draw it more surely than if he had it in tow!†   (source)
  • Self-beguilement with what she had known all the time to be false had given her strength to come over half a mile that she would have been powerless to face in the lump.†   (source)
  • A great multitude had already assembled; the windows were filled with people, smoking and playing cards to beguile the time; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling, joking.†   (source)
  • Sunday was as yet two days off; but meanwhile, to beguile his impatience, Newman took his way to the Avenue de Messine and got what comfort he could in staring at the blank outer wall of Madame de Cintre's present residence.†   (source)
  • Often when she woke Jo found Beth reading in her well-worn little book, heard her singing softly, to beguile the sleepless night, or saw her lean her face upon her hands, while slow tears dropped through the transparent fingers, and Jo would lie watching her with thoughts too deep for tears, feeling that Beth, in her simple, unselfish way, was trying to wean herself from the dear old life, and fit herself for the life to come, by sacred words of comfort, quiet prayers, and the music…†   (source)
  • The whole seemingly monotonous and uncompanionable half-dozen, stabled together, may pass the long wet hours when the door is shut in livelier communication than is held in the servants' hall or at the Dedlock Arms, or may even beguile the time by improving (perhaps corrupting) the pony in the loose-box in the corner.†   (source)
  • It was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years!'†   (source)
  • The gentlemen entreated him not to hurry himself; and, to beguile the interval, had a fencing bout with their walking-sticks on the very small landing-place: to the unspeakable discomposure of all the other lodgers downstairs.†   (source)
  • …wend you we might do all these journeys in one so brief life as He hath appointed that created life, and thereto death likewise with help of Adam, who by sin done through persuasion of his helpmeet, she being wrought upon and bewrayed by the beguilements of the great enemy of man, that serpent hight Satan, aforetime consecrated and set apart unto that evil work by overmastering spite and envy begotten in his heart through fell ambitions that did blight and mildew a nature erst so white…†   (source)
  • But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary.†   (source)
  • In a week or two, there was a great improvement of symptoms,—one of those deceitful lulls, by which her inexorable disease so often beguiles the anxious heart, even on the verge of the grave.†   (source)
  • Ruinous Folly, eldest daughter of Zeus, beguiles us all.†   (source)
  • All these words said Palomides for to beguile Sir Tristram.†   (source)
  • Aphrodite likes to beguile the women of Akhaia to elope with Trojans, whom she so adores: now, fondling some Akhaian girl, I fear, she scratched her slim white hand on a golden pin.†   (source)
  • Now by my faith I know well that he will grieve some of the court of King Arthur; for on him knights will be bold, and deem that it is I, and that will beguile them.†   (source)
  • BOOK FOURTEEN Beguilement on Mount Ida Now Nestor heard that tumult while he drank, but finished drinking.†   (source)
  • And Lady Hera, deep in her beguilement, answered: "Lend me longing, lend me desire, by which you bring immortals low as you do mortal men! y I am on my way to kind Earths bourne to see Okeanos, from whom the gods arose, and Mother Tethys.†   (source)
  • And by the white bird might men understand the fiend, and I shall tell you how the swan is white without-forth, and black within: it is hypocrisy which is without yellow or pale, and seemeth without-forth the servants of Jesu Christ, but they be within so horrible of filth and sin, and beguile the world evil.†   (source)
  • How shall we beguile The lazy time, if not with some delight?   (source)
    beguile = to charm someone; or to deceive -- especially through charm
  • she was beguiled and surprised   (source)
    beguiled = deceived
  • beguile the rich and poor   (source)
    beguile = deceive
  • So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile;   (source)
    beguile = charm and/or deceive
  • Ralph Touchett took his refreshment wherever he could find it, and he would not have forgiven himself if he had been left wholly unbeguiled by such a mistress of the social art.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unbeguiled means not and reverses the meaning of beguiled. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
  • The voice in my head grew still more soothing, friendly, beguiling.†   (source)
  • Still beguiled by her dream,
    down she went through the house to tell her parents now,
    her beloved father and mother.†   (source)
  • …than war shall cover thee all over, (Wert capable of war, its tug and trials? be capable of peace, its trials, For the tug and mortal strain of nations come at last in prosperous peace, not war;) In many a smiling mask death shall approach beguiling thee, thou in disease shalt swelter, The livid cancer spread its hideous claws, clinging upon thy breasts, seeking to strike thee deep within, Consumption of the worst, moral consumption, shall rouge thy face with hectic, But thou shalt…†   (source)
  • And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.†   (source)
  • ^ Thy broken vows, thy friends beguiled Have shut for thee the ears of God.†   (source)
  • Then they all looked upon Sir Launcelot and said: Ye have beguiled us with your covered shield.†   (source)
  • Marry, she says that the very same man that beguiled Master Slender of his chain cozened him of it.†   (source)
  • Then when Sir Mordred wist and understood how he was beguiled, he was passing wroth out of measure.†   (source)
  • Well, said King Mark, yet shall he be beguiled.†   (source)
  • With these in troop Came Astoreth, whom the Phoenicians called Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns; To whose bright image nightly by the moon Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs; In Sion also not unsung, where stood Her temple on th' offensive mountain, built By that uxorious king whose heart, though large, Beguiled by fair idolatresses, fell To idols foul.†   (source)
  • I know, sir, I am no flatterer: he that beguiled you in a plain accent was a plain knave; which, for my part, I will not be, though I should win your displeasure to entreat me to't.†   (source)
  • *simple With covetise anon thou shalt be blent;* *blinded; beguiled O graceless, full blind is thy conceit!†   (source)
  • …once more, "there never was any Felixmarte of Hircania in the world, nor any Cirongilio of Thrace, or any of the other knights of the same sort, that the books of chivalry talk of; the whole thing is the fabrication and invention of idle wits, devised by them for the purpose you describe of beguiling the time, as your reapers do when they read; for I swear to you in all seriousness there never were any such knights in the world, and no such exploits or nonsense ever happened anywhere."†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)