Word of the Day:
insidious
What It Means
Causing harm in a stealthy, often gradual, manner.
Intending to entrap; alluring but harmful.
Hansel and Gretel were lured by the witch’s insidious gingerbread house.
Insidious in Context
“At some point in time they may become the source of an insidious cancer.”
Did You Know?
From Middle French insidieux, from Latin īnsidiōsus (“cunning, artful, deceitful”), from īnsidiae (“a lying in wait, an ambush, artifice, stratagem”) + -ōsus, from īnsideō (“to sit in or on”), from in (“in, on”) + sedeō (“to sit”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: insidious (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “insidious.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/insidious. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.