Word.ws English Dictionary

Daedalian

/dɪˈdeɪliən/

Daedalian adjective: ingeniously or cunningly designed; artistic, ingenious, intricate, skillful.

Adjective

Daedalian (comparative more Daedalian, superlative most Daedalian)

  1. Ingeniously or cunningly designed; artistic, ingenious, intricate, skillful.
    • "The commerce and industry of the country, ... cannot be altogether so secure when they are thus, as it were, suspended upon the Daedalian wings of paper money as when they travel about upon the solid ground of gold and silver"1812, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations volume 1, book 2, chapter 2, page 484, published in London by Cadell and Davies
    • Hicks is both thwarter and thwartee of Daedalean plots. Aboard a train, the rhythm of the wheels sounds to him like "wottachump, wottachump, wottachump."2025 October 2, Dwight Garner, “Book Review: 'Shadow Ticket,' by Thomas Pynchon”, in The New York Times Book Review, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the...
  2. Difficult to comprehend due to complexity or intricacy.
  3. Deceitful, duplicitous.

Forms of Daedalian

comparativemore Daedalian
superlativemost Daedalian
alternative formDaedalean
alternative formDedalian

Origin of Daedalian

From Daedalus + -ian.

Words formed from Daedalian

Questions about Daedalian

What does Daedalian mean?
Daedalian means ingeniously or cunningly designed; artistic, ingenious, intricate, skillful.
What part of speech is Daedalian?
Daedalian is an adjective.
How do you pronounce Daedalian?
Daedalian is pronounced /dɪˈdeɪliən/.

Words near Daedalian in the dictionary

  1. daedala
  2. Daedalean
  3. daedaleoid
  4. daedaleous
  5. daedalia
  6. Daedalian
  7. Daedalic
  8. Daedalidae
  9. daedally
  10. daedaloid
  11. daedalous

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Daedalian (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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-Daedalian.wav.

Cite this entry: “Daedalian.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/daedalian. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.