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Definition
cleverness in dealing with others — especially in business- a canny investor
- a crew of canny thieves
- Our people like it, and I think we are a pretty canny set.Louisa May Alcott -- Eight Cousins
- It's no canny to run frae London to the Black Sea wi' a wind ahint ye, as though the Deil himself were blawin' on yer sail for his ain purpose.Bram Stoker -- Dracula
- A cannier man might have argued even so, but Junior didn't have it in him and he changed the subject to the bathroom arrangements.Anne Tayler -- A Spool of Blue Thread
- This was a rather legalistic maneuver, but Phaedrus by this time had developed a kind of combative canniness.Robert M. Pirsig -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Emma flashed a canny smile.Ransom Riggs -- Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
- She'd seen him sidle up to women in public places to ask some delving question in his blank-faced canny way.Don DeLillo -- White Noise
- My wife was on all fours now, racing around the terminal as the frogs cannily stayed one hop ahead of her.John Grogan -- Marley & Me
- Is she got a reggiler big canny staw?Henry Roth -- Call It Sleep
- They figured if he had seen them he was a canny one, but they lay quiet, curious like squirrels.Louis L'Amour -- The Broken Gun
- Cannily, all Randy said was, "If you have Preacher's permission, it's all right with me.Pat Frank -- Alas, Babylon
- I battled him with all my strength and canniness about the game.Pat Conroy -- The Lords of Discipline
- That's what I want cannily to prevent.Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1
- We shall get you off cannily, Dick: and it will be better, both for your sake, and for that of the poor creature in yonder.Charlotte Bronte -- Jane Eyre
- Hoots, but they're na canny.T. H. White -- The Once and Future King
- He had the canny self-assurance of an industry maverick, the outsider who tries to roil the works, japing every complacent rule of belief.Don DeLillo -- Underworld
- That's what I want cannily to prevent.Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2
- There was a kind of quiet wisdom or canniness there, no doubt of that.V.S. Naipaul -- A Bend in the River
- When all was silent, he smiled a canny smile and spoke in his deepest down-home southern drawl.Russell Baker -- Growing Up