Word.ws English Dictionary

wile

/waɪl/

wile noun: a trick or stratagem practiced for ensnaring or deception; a sly, insidious artifice. Also the misspelling of while.

Noun

wile (plural wiles)

  1. (plural-normally) A trick or stratagem practiced for ensnaring or deception; a sly, insidious artifice
    • He was seduced by her wiles.
    • to frustrate all our plots and wiles1667, John Milton, “Book II”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished...

Verb

wile (third-person singular simple present wiles, present participle wiling, simple past and past participle wiled)

  1. (transitive) To entice or lure.
    • He was good to look on, brawly dressed, and with a tongue in his head that would have wiled the bird from the tree.1902, John Buchan, The Outgoing of the Tide

Proper noun capitalized: Wile

Wile

  1. A surname transferred from the nickname.
  2. (rare) A male given name transferred from the surname.

Also used as

wile is also the misspelling of while.

Examples of wile in a sentence

  • Their worship was but enchantment, sorcery, unlike the sacred law of fire-worship, wiles and magic.
  • But despite her wiles, he had never quite stuck his foot in the trap.
  • Wiles ended his lecture with these words: "And by the way, this means that Fermat's Last Theorem was true.

All 13 example sentences with wile

Synonyms of wile

Forms of wile

Noun
pluralwiles
Verb
third-person singular presentwiles
present participlewiling
past participlewiled
pastwiled

Plural of wile: wiles

Origin of wile

From Middle English wile, wyle, from Old Northern French wile (“guile”) and Old English wīl (“wile, trick”) and wiġle (“divination”), from Proto-Germanic *wīlą (“craft, deceit”) (from Proto-Indo-European *wey- (“to turn, bend”)) and Proto-Germanic *wigulą, *wihulą (“prophecy”) (from Proto-Indo-European *weyk- (“to consecrate, hallow, make holy”)). Cognate with Icelandic vél, væl (“artifice, craft, device, fraud, trick”), Dutch wijle. Doublet of guile.

The phrase meaning to pass time idly is while away. We can trace the meaning in an adjectival sense for while back to Old English, hwīlen, "passing, transitory". It is also seen in whilend, "temporary, transitory". But since wile away occurs so often, it is now included in many dictionaries.

From Middle English wile, an occupational surname for a trapper or a nickname for a wily person.

Words formed from wile

Phrases with wile

Words that rhyme with wile

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about wile

What does wile mean?
Wile means a trick or stratagem practiced for ensnaring or deception; a sly, insidious artifice.
What part of speech is wile?
Wile can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce wile?
Wile is pronounced /waɪl/.
What is the plural of wile?
The plural of wile is wiles.

Words near wile in the dictionary

  1. Wildts
  2. wildtype
  3. wildtypes
  4. wildwood
  5. wildwoods
  6. wile
  7. wile away
  8. Wile E. Coyote
  9. Wile E. Coyote'd
  10. Wile E. Coyote-ing
  11. Wile E. Coyotes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wile (page history and authors); Wile (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Persent101-wile.wav.

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