All 3 Uses
cunning
in
The Purloined Letter
(Auto-generated)
- They are persevering, ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly versed in the knowledge which their duties seem chiefly to demand.†
*cunning = good at achieving goals through cleverness and deception
- Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, 'the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;'—he guesses odd, and wins.†
- They are right in this much—that their own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the mass; but when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their own, the felon foils them, of course.†
Definitions:
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(1)
(cunning as in: a cunning thief) being good at achieving goals through cleverness -- and typically through deception as well (tricking others)
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) At one time, cunning was also used as a synonym for cute.