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insidious
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show 153 more with this conextual meaning
  • The real secret was that communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values...   (source)
    insidiously = in a manner that did not appear dangerous, but was actually very harmful over time
  • This isn't an obvious verbal message that we automatically dig in our heels against. It's much more subtle and for that reason much more insidious, and that much harder to insulate ourselves against.   (source)
    insidious = dangerous while not appearing harmful
  • She waited while he completed his impassioned speech on the moral decline of the country, the insidious corruption that stemmed from promiscuity, conception control, genetic engineering.   (source)
    insidious = not appearing dangerous, but actually very harmful over time
  • They've already been screened for anything insidious.   (source)
    insidious = treacherous  (dangerous due to trickery or from hidden or unpredictable risks)
  • [referring to radiation poisoning]  He could forget the insidious, the invisible, the implacable enemy, but not forever.   (source)
    insidious = dangerous in a way that is not easily seen
  • But how could she have known, if she was not told, how to answer those veiled, insidious questions?   (source)
    insidious = not appearing dangerous, but actually treacherous (harmful in a tricky way)
  • It's insidious.   (source)
    insidious = not appearing dangerous, but actually very harmful over time
  • little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way   (source)
  • ...all the same she knew that she had come up against something that was both insidious and tough, and against which she needed allies.   (source)
    insidious = dangerous
  • The insidious revolt led by Buck had destroyed the solidarity of the team.   (source)
    insidious = very harmful over time
  • Streets that follow like a tedious argument
    Of insidious intent   (source)
    insidious = appearing harmless, but actually very harmful over time
  • They were designed for winter wear, when treacherous drafts came down chimneys and insidious currents of deadly cold found their way through key-holes.   (source)
    insidious = treacherous
  • How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther.   (source)
    insidious = not appearing dangerous, but actually harmful
  • There was scrub and long grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from their insidious approach.   (source)
    insidious = appearing harmless (or even desirable), but actually very harmful over time
  • Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience.   (source)
    insidiously = in a dangerous, tricky manner
  • Heyward withdrew to the rampart, too uneasy and too little accustomed to the warfare of the woods to remain at ease under the possibility of such insidious attacks.   (source)
    insidious = treacherous  (dangerous due to trickery or from hidden or unpredictable risks)
  • In Naoetsu's little POW insurgency, perhaps the most insidious feat was pulled off by Louie's friend Ken Marvin, a marine who'd been captured at Wake Atoll.†   (source)
  • Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious.†   (source)
  • But how insidious a bargain he'd made.†   (source)
  • People hawking time-shares are the most insidious, luring their prospective victims with far more than the usual free T-shirt or can opener.†   (source)
  • Blood-drenched pyramids lit by insidious fires seen through dark forests.†   (source)
  • Insidious!†   (source)
  • Baretski laughs his insidious laugh.†   (source)
  • The seniors had been trotted off to the improvised obstacle course in the woods, or to have their blood pressure taken again, or to undergo an insidious exercise in The Cage which consisted in stepping up on a box and down again in rapid rhythm for five minutes.†   (source)
  • They fill us with insidious revisionist ideas.†   (source)
  • At the same time, Turner understood the exhilaration among the tormentors and the insidious way it could claim him.†   (source)
  • Another group must have been told to practice insidious harassment inside the classrooms.†   (source)
  • He found a sympathetic Rider, and there his insidious words took root.†   (source)
  • I fluctuated between anticipation so intense that it was very nearly pain, and an insidious fear that picked at my resolve.†   (source)
  • What I should say is that I await the day when some vocal minority finally rises up to say it's gone too far, and that this tool, which is far more insidious than any human invention that's come before it, must be checked, regulated, turned back, and that, most of all, we need options for opting out.†   (source)
  • Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, faced the insidious snares of old age with savage temerity, even though he knew that his peculiar fate had been to look like an old man from the time he was a boy.†   (source)
  • They were insidious—bleeding off just enough to keep the host from objecting until they had you in their fist where they could force you to pay and pay and pay.†   (source)
  • Salander took a tour around the cabin, looking suspicious, but she seemed to relax when she could find no immediate signs of any insidious trap.†   (source)
  • My doubts rise insidiously from the soil of my mind like creeping, choking vines.†   (source)
  • "Insidious, that's what you people are.†   (source)
  • It's the insidious, cruel paradox of lengthy sentences: for women doing seven, twelve, twenty years, the only way to survive was to accept prison as their universe.†   (source)
  • Different objects harbor threats of various insidious types.†   (source)
  • Migrants who were seemingly coming to the United States to clean toilets and hammer nails were actually, from his perspective, hatching an insidious plot to recapture land Mexico lost during the 1846-48 Mexican-American War.†   (source)
  • The abrupt stillness seemed alien and artificial, a little insidious.†   (source)
  • What an insidious presence that brat had been in her life.†   (source)
  • It was someone else, someone more insidious than Ras.†   (source)
  • You rode to the job in an insidious mix of diesel fumes and gray cigarette smoke, the big trucks moaning, bouncing, jerking along the roads, and before you had done even a lick of work you were wishing the day was over, the sun was down.†   (source)
  • Then suddenly, as strong as the will is and as strong as the body remains, the mind slowly, insidiously begins to reject the necessity to make an immediate decision-both intellectually and physically.†   (source)
  • Lord North, the Prime Minister, had delivered a conciliatory speech to Parliament; George III even recommended opening a channel of communication with "that insidious man" Franklin, with the result that a host of British agents began beating a path to Paris to ascertain what peace terms the Americans might consider.†   (source)
  • Censorship has affected me directly, and I have formed some ideas on this insidious activity, but fist, I want to give an example of censorship which recently affected a friend of mine.†   (source)
  • The most insidious thing about bondage was how easy it was to grow accustomed to it.†   (source)
  • And little does LBJ know that insidious forces are possibly targeting Bobby even now—plotting not only the attorney general's downfall, but that of the entire Kennedy family political dynasty.†   (source)
  • Sarcasm might be even more insidious and dangerous than negativism.†   (source)
  • And let's not insult the American people with the supposition that they will ever allow the long series of insidious measures that would necessitate the use of armed force.†   (source)
  • Bruenor's grim tone brought many of the spokesmen to realize that the threat was simply too grave to be passed off as the deception of a desperate captive, or even as a more insidious plan by Cassius and some conspirators.†   (source)
  • A touch of hysteria almost perfectly pitched between grief and hilarity seized her as she pondered the irony of dying of such an insidious and inexplicable disease after all the other sicknesses she had survived and after all, in so many countless ways, she had seen and known and endured.†   (source)
  • ESTRAGON: (very insidious).†   (source)
  • It's insidious.†   (source)
  • The drumming, at dose range, was deafening and hypnotic, the rhythms complicated, syncopated, insidious.†   (source)
  • It would practically have revolutionized our splendid political fabric into a partisan Congressional autocracy…… This government had never faced so insidious a danger …. control by the worst element of American politics…… If Andrew Johnson were acquitted by a nonpartisan vote ….†   (source)
  • We face a hostile ideology-- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.†   (source)
  • The sunshine dazzled and glittered, but held no menace; this was not the sun of October, that insidiously sapped from within.†   (source)
  • You were heavily and insidiously drugged.   (source)
    insidiously = treacherously  (in a dangerous, tricky manner)
  • "But the demons of the past," he continued, "were demons of fire and abomination . . . they were enemies we could fight-enemies who inspired fear. Yet Satan is shrewd. As time passed, he cast off his diabolical countenance for a new face . . . the face of pure reason. Transparent and insidious..."   (source)
    insidious = not appearing dangerous, but actually very harmful over time
  • I imagined the tumor metastasizing into my own bones, boring holes into my skeleton, a slithering eel of insidious intent.   (source)
    insidious = treacherous
  • They would see another lie, and one so richly irresistible-the idea that the human could live on after implantation-so tempting to believe from their perspective, so insidious, that they would believe I was a Seeker more surely than if I claimed it.   (source)
    insidious = treacherous  (dangerous due to trickery)
  • Insidiously, and by remote ways, as well as by the power of stick and stone and clout of hand, were the shackles of White Fang's bondage being riveted upon him.   (source)
    insidiously = in a manner that does not appear dangerous, but which is actually very harmful over time
  • It was as if Boyle were taking his body and brain away from him, creeping up insidiously inside.†   (source)
  • I was so time-zoned, dazed by fatigue and revelation, so deep in the stink of a friend's falseheartedness that I started talking nonstop, manic and jaggy, babble-mouthing into the plane noise, hinting—I hinted insidiously, made clever references.†   (source)
  • I had unwittingly created a new stereotype among the island people and it seemed insidiously pervasive among the parents.†   (source)
  • His insidious smirk is never off his face.†   (source)
  • His voice lowered and he repeated: "A poison—so subtle, so insidious …. so irreversible.†   (source)
  • I mourn the slow, insidious way in which I'm dying.†   (source)
  • But Max knew something insidious was at work—a fading within the mind.†   (source)
  • It was like seditious and insidious too, and like socialist, suspicious, fascist and Communist.†   (source)
  • The insidious trespasser offers no complaint.†   (source)
  • That the design is insidious and hostile at heart, I will not say.†   (source)
  • An insidious voice in my head chuckles when I try to convince myself of this.†   (source)
  • The insidious lies he had planned to weave would have little value on the unaffected wizard.†   (source)
  • She was insidious and corrupt and it was like hearing your grandmother talk dirty in your ear.†   (source)
  • I can offer no reason under the sun why you should capitulate to my insidious suggestion.†   (source)
  • The clinic was funded by a foundation called the Himalayan Rescue Association primarily to treat altitude-related illnesses (although it also offered free treatment to the local Sherpas) and to educate trekkers about the insidious hazards of ascending too high, too fast.†   (source)
  • He turned with an insidious expression and said to Qin Shi Huang, "Your Imperial Majesty, in order to improve system stability, you should take certain maintenance measures with respect to faulty components."†   (source)
  • As bad as were the physical consequences of captivity, the emotional injuries were much more insidious, widespread, and enduring.†   (source)
  • She was unable, after prolonged and insidious interrogations, to ascertain the causes of Amaranta's prostration.†   (source)
  • When she had proven immune to Rialla's insidious whisperings—and indeed finally denounced the woman for being a coward and a traitor—the figment was taken from her chamber, and Galbatorix moved on to another ploy.†   (source)
  • There was a period in which he spent every waking minute in front of his computer screen, writing his own programmes and planting insidious tendrils on the Internet.†   (source)
  • Eragon found his wife much weakened from the growth, and it took all of his skill to extract the insidious tendrils from her flesh.†   (source)
  • Whether compelled by some insidious lure in the monster's call or driven by mere terror, Mina responded in kind.†   (source)
  • The secret had worked its way through their marriage, an insidious vine, twisting; she drank too much and then she began to have affairs, that sleazy Realtor at the beach and then others; he'd tried not to notice, to forgive her, for he knew that in some real sense the fault was his.†   (source)
  • He was not pained by the peeling of the whitewash on the walls or the dirty, cottony cobwebs in the corners or the dust on the begonias or the veins left on the beams by the termites or the moss on the hinges or any of the insidious traps that nostalgia offered him.†   (source)
  • From what Max could tell, the animal wasn't injured; some insidious force or perhaps sheer horror had compelled the horse to succumb, to lie still and wait for the demon to devour it.†   (source)
  • Which makes it more insidious.†   (source)
  • Years before, when she had reached one hundred forty-five years of age, she had given up the pernicious custom of keeping track of her age and she went on living in the static and marginal time of memories, in a future perfectly revealed and established, beyond the futures disturbed by the insidious snares and suppositions of her cards.†   (source)
  • Hunger and thirst tormented him, but he did not waste away or perish, for there was some insidious magic in the baka that sustained his body even as it destroyed his mind.†   (source)
  • Major Danby confided that Group was incensed with all flight surgeons because of Dr. Stubbs, the bushy-haired, baggy-chinned, slovenly flight surgeon in Dunbar's squadron who was deliberately and defiantly brewing insidious dissension there by grounding all men with sixty missions on proper forms that were rejected by Group indignantly with orders restoring the confused pilots, navigators, bombardiers and gunners to combat duty.†   (source)
  • In medical texts of the time, "nervous fever," or "slow nervous fever," was defined as an "insidious and dangerous" malady that began with list-lessness, followed by chills, flushes of heat, "and a kind of weariness all over, like what is felt after a great fatigue.†   (source)
  • Till now the Republicans have indeed beaten the slaves of monarchy in the field of battle, and driven the troops of the King of Great Britain from the shores of our country; but the secret enemies of the American Revolution—her internal, insidious, and indefatigable foes, have never till now been completely discomfitted.†   (source)
  • Now he knew what it meant, this word that was bandied and bruited so easily, and he sensed the connections being made around him, all the objects and shaped silhouettes and levels of knowledge—not knowledge exactly but insidious intent.†   (source)
  • But whenever such urges came over him, some insidious spell always took hold … some governing force that stopped him just short of warning his friend or taking any action that might interfere with David's course.†   (source)
  • Another one named Zach Sklar was a Russian Jew" Stone considered the program an insidious, corrosive threat to his domination of the island's people and politics.†   (source)
  • Not just because it made you fat, made your heart work harder than an old heart should, but bad in ways more insidious--the same as buying without shopping first for a reasonable bargain, or buying what you didn't need, or not buying at all, on the other hand, because your mind was too much on the column of numbers written under "Deposits" in your bank book.†   (source)
  • And as Wang Lung hung his head she said softly and insidiously, "And I suppose you have not looked at anything else, have you, eh?†   (source)
  • Some exceedingly illusive and vital significance of life had insidiously come to Carley.†   (source)
  • She understood that Rosedale was ready to lend her money; and the longing to take advantage of his offer began to haunt her insidiously.†   (source)
  • As he had often done before, he pulled his hat over his face and watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the interstices of the straw.†   (source)
  • The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time—time that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights.†   (source)
  • Unawares it had stolen insidiously into all her waking and perhaps sleeping hours--and then, in an unguarded moment, when chance threw Tom Doan again into her presence, it had brazenly surprised her into betrayal.†   (source)
  • But insidiously, without his knowing it, the warmth he felt for Clara drew him away from Miriam, for whom he felt responsible, and to whom he felt he belonged.†   (source)
  • The thought was insidiously alluring.†   (source)
  • Yet such was her intensity and stress at times, especially in the darkness of waking hours, that jealousy overcame her and insidiously worked its havoc.†   (source)
  • Within was a paddock in an uncultivated state, though bearing evidence of having once been tilled; but the heath and fern had insidiously crept in, and were reasserting their old supremacy.†   (source)
  • …artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it;…†   (source)
  • There's a special, insidious kind of hatred for him.†   (source)
  • He snapped orders and lost his patience before the smallest difficulty; when he lost his patience, he screamed at people: he had a vocabulary of insults that carried a caustic, insidious, almost feminine malice; his face was sullen.†   (source)
  • It swept silent and insidious under the bridge, travelling in a soft body.†   (source)
  • Carley felt insidious jealousy of this last possibility.†   (source)
  • Doggedly Duane fought against the insidious phantom.†   (source)
  • There are high-handed insolent frauds, and there are insidious sneaking ones.†   (source)
  • …that was the danger—he looked weakly; advised football, invited him to supper and was seeing his way to consider recommending a rise of salary, when something happened which threw out many of Mr. Brewer's calculations, took away his ablest young fellows, and eventually, so prying and insidious were the fingers of the European War, smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole in the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook's nerves at Mr. Brewer's establishment at Muswell Hill.†   (source)
  • Weeks had listened politely, with smiling modesty, till Hayward finished; then he asked one or two insidious questions, so innocent in appearance that Hayward, not seeing into what a quandary they led him, answered blandly; Weeks made a courteous objection, then a correction of fact, after that a quotation from some little known Latin commentator, then a reference to a German authority; and the fact was disclosed that he was a scholar.†   (source)
  • In Helen, experiences gathered realization slowly, and it was this swift ride, the horses neck and neck, and all the wildness and beauty, that completed the slow, insidious work of years.†   (source)
  • Besides, it was only jealousy that made him burn to know the Mormon's identity, and jealousy had become a creeping, insidious, growing fire.†   (source)
  • The next moment Milly would try to drive away the sweet insidious musing, to ponder over her presence there in this rattling wagon, and what might be in store for her.†   (source)
  • Miss Schlegel waited her turn, and finally had to be content with an insidious "temporary," being rejected by genuine housemaids on the ground of her numerous stairs.†   (source)
  • The insidious beauty of this place!†   (source)
  • She fought at times against an insidious change—a growing older—a going backward; at other times she drifted through hours that seemed quiet and golden, in which nothing happened.†   (source)
  • It was the precise converse of this relief which I felt when my anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my consciousness in a manner infinitely more rapid, instantaneous almost, a manner at once insidious and brutal as I breathed in—a far more poisonous thing than any moral penetration—the peculiar smell of the varnish upon that staircase.†   (source)
  • The voice without a body went on singing; and certainly Raoul had never in his life heard anything more absolutely and heroically sweet, more gloriously insidious, more delicate, more powerful, in short, more irresistibly triumphant.†   (source)
  • And after a time, feeling better, freer, more natural, more human, as he so much wished to feel—he returned to his room, once more to sleep, with the feeling that he had actually succeeded in eliminating completely a most insidious and horrible visitation.†   (source)
  • For, almost at once, she had felt the insidious charm of slipping back into a life where every material difficulty was smoothed away.†   (source)
  • Nothing she owed, however, or tried to instil into her vacillating mind, quite did away with that insidious suspicion.†   (source)
  • When she went to bed that night she felt not only the insidious inception of a revolt, but also a realization that strength was coming from somewhere, as if with the magic of these new thoughts.†   (source)
  • She had overthrown the sordid, self-seeking habit of life; she had awakened to real womanhood; she had fought the insidious spell of modernity and she had defeated it; she had learned the thrill of taking root in new soil, the pain and joy of labor, the bliss of solitude, the promise of home and love and motherhood.†   (source)
  • She meant to take her in the carriage, leave her at the Abbey Mill, while she drove a little farther, and call for her again so soon, as to allow no time for insidious applications or dangerous recurrences to the past, and give the most decided proof of what degree of intimacy was chosen for the future.†   (source)
  • …fish–filled waterways: anglerfish whose comical movements qualify them for the epithet "clowns," black Commerson anglers equipped with their antennas, undulating triggerfish encircled by little red bands, bloated puffers whose venom is extremely insidious, some olive–hued lampreys, snipefish covered with silver scales, cutlass fish whose electrocuting power equals that of the electric eel and the electric ray, scaly featherbacks with brown crosswise bands, greenish codfish, several…†   (source)
  • It was observed that even medical families cannot escape the more insidious forms of disease, and that, after all, Dr. Sloper had lost other patients beside the two I have mentioned; which constituted an honourable precedent.†   (source)
  • The lamp burnt dimly in the middle of the dark, luxurious, isolated room; from time to time the blind was shaken, and there flowed in the freshness of the insidious night; there was heard its mysterious whisperings.†   (source)
  • Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's?†   (source)
  • The savages, who had dismounted at some little distance, had not time to draw around the base of the hill in their customary silent and insidious manner, before the voice of the Amazon was raised, demanding— "Who is beneath?†   (source)
  • She admitted that insidious feeling which binds woman so strongly to man, by feeling additional security in finding herself under his care; and, for the first time since leaving Fort Stanwix, she was entirely at her ease in the frail bark in which she travelled.†   (source)
  • I only want to drum into the heads of these curs the fact that the liberals are the most insidious enemies of freedom—that party programmes strangle every young and vigorous truth—that considerations of expediency turn morality and justice upside down—and that they will end by making life here unbearable.†   (source)
  • But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.†   (source)
  • It was not exactly that it would be base or insidious; for women as a general thing practise such manoeuvres with a perfectly good conscience, and Isabel was instinctively much more true than false to the common genius of her sex.†   (source)
  • She was from New England, and knew well the first guileful footsteps of that soft, insidious disease, which sweeps away so many of the fairest and loveliest, and, before one fibre of life seems broken, seals them irrevocably for death.†   (source)
  • I answer no such irrelevant and insidious questions; though were I to answer all that you could put in the course of an hour, you would never be able to prove that it was not Thornton Lacey—for such it certainly was.†   (source)
  • At this moment, an ingenious and animating suspicion entering Emma's brain with regard to Jane Fairfax, this charming Mr. Dixon, and the not going to Ireland, she said, with the insidious design of farther discovery, "You must feel it very fortunate that Miss Fairfax should be allowed to come to you at such a time.†   (source)
  • Mr. Crawford was no longer the Mr. Crawford who, as the clandestine, insidious, treacherous admirer of Maria Bertram, had been her abhorrence, whom she had hated to see or to speak to, in whom she could believe no good quality to exist, and whose power, even of being agreeable, she had barely acknowledged.†   (source)
  • Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received?†   (source)
  • Break off insidious quarrels, and young and old, the Argives will respect you for it more.†   (source)
  • Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.†   (source)
  • Attempts so extravagant as these to disfigure or, it might rather be said, to metamorphose the object, render it necessary to take an accurate view of its real nature and form: in order as well to ascertain its true aspect and genuine appearance, as to unmask the disingenuity and expose the fallacy of the counterfeit resemblances which have been so insidiously, as well as industriously, propagated.†   (source)
  • Such insidious purifications and consecrations of slang are going on under our noses all the time.†   (source)
  • Insidious.†   (source)
  • With the same insidious views, they now seduced the members from the league, by representing to their pride the violation it committed on their sovereignty.†   (source)
  • Let us rather no longer insult them with the supposition that they can ever reduce themselves to the necessity of making the experiment, by a blind and tame submission to the long train of insidious measures which must precede and produce it.†   (source)
  • ...he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior.   (source)
    insidious = dangerous in a way that is not easily seen
  • Streets that follow like a tedious argument
    Of insidious intent
    To lead you to an overwhelming question…
    Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
    Let us go and make our visit.   (source)
    insidious = treacherous
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