Word.ws English Dictionary

sleightly

sleightly adverb: with cunning; dexterously.

Adverb

sleightly (comparative more sleightly, superlative most sleightly)

  1. (obsolete) With cunning; dexterously.
    • He healeth others sleightly, because he is sick of the same malady1658, Samuel Crooke, Τα Διαφεροντα, or Divine characters in two parts, acutely distinguishing the more secret and undiscerned differences between 1. The Hypocrite in his best dresse of seeming...
    • The raveled is a kind of cheat bread also, but it retaineth more of the gross and less of the pure substance of the wheat; and this [manchet], being more sleightly wrought up, is used in the halls of the nobility and gentry only, whereas the other [cheat bread] either is or should be baked, in...1994, William Harrison, Georges Edelen, The Description of England, page 134

Forms of sleightly

comparativemore sleightly
superlativemost sleightly

Origin of sleightly

Inherited from Middle English sleightely; equivalent to sleight + -ly.

Questions about sleightly

What does sleightly mean?
Sleightly means with cunning; dexterously.
What part of speech is sleightly?
Sleightly is an adverb.

Words near sleightly in the dictionary

  1. sleighsful
  2. sleight
  3. sleight of hand
  4. sleight-of-hand
  5. sleightful
  6. sleightly
  7. sleights
  8. sleights of hand
  9. sleights-of-hand
  10. sleighty
  11. Sleipnir

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sleightly (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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Cite this entry: “sleightly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sleightly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.