Word.ws English Dictionary

by the sly

by the sly adverb: on the sly.

Adverb

by the sly (not comparable)

  1. (dated) on the sly
    • I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor was assuring me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill."1859, George Eliot, The Lifted Veil

Questions about by the sly

What does by the sly mean?
By the sly means on the sly.
What part of speech is by the sly?
By the sly is an adverb.

Words near by the sly in the dictionary

  1. by the piece
  2. by the rood
  3. by the same token
  4. by the score
  5. by the skin of one's teeth
  6. by the sly
  7. by the sound of it
  8. by the strong hand
  9. by the time
  10. by the ton
  11. by the way

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: by the sly (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “by the sly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/by_the_sly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.