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Devious   /dˈiviəs/   Listen
Devious

adjective
1.
Indirect in departing from the accepted or proper way; misleading.  Synonym: oblique.  "Gave oblique answers to direct questions" , "Oblique political maneuvers"
2.
Characterized by insincerity or deceit; evasive.  Synonym: shifty.  "Shifty eyes"
3.
Deviating from a straight course.  Synonyms: circuitous, roundabout.  "A long and circuitous journey by train and boat" , "A roundabout route avoided rush-hour traffic"



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"Devious" Quotes from Famous Books



... enlarged to a monster, and each party was skilful to exaggerate the absurd or impious conclusions that might be extorted from the principles of their adversaries. To escape from each other, they wandered through many a dark and devious thicket, till they were astonished by the horrid phantoms of Cerinthus and Apollinaris, who guarded the opposite issues of the theological labyrinth. As soon as they beheld the twilight of sense and heresy, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... her came a sound like a sigh, after which, slowly, tongues were loosened. An interval of impatient waiting, then the music again and the parting curtains, and Darden's Audrey,—the girl who could so paint very love, very sorrow, very death; the girl who had come strangely and by a devious path from the height and loneliness of the mountains to the level of this ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... when I returned to Paris, it no longer exhibited the same appearance as in 1789 and 1790. It was no longer the new-born Revolution, but a people intoxicated, rushing on to fulfil its destiny across abysses and by devious ways. The appearance of the people was no longer curious and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... doubled upon itself, and led only into the bowels of the mountain. Gnawed by hunger, and conscious that in a few hours at most the rising tide would fill the subterranean passage and cut off his retreat, he pushed desperately onwards. He had descended some ninety feet, and had lost, in the devious windings of his downward path, all but the reflection of the light from the gallery, when he was rewarded by a glimpse of sunshine striking upwards. He parted two enormous masses of seaweed, whose bubble-headed ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... meanness that the colonel had chased him ignominiously down Main Street and pilloried him upon the schoolhouse wall. Fetters the man, a Goliath whom no David had yet opposed, had fastened himself upon a weak and disorganised community, during a period of great distress and had succeeded by devious ways in making himself its master. And as the colonel stood looking at the picture he was conscious of a faint echo of his boyish indignation and sense of outraged honour. Already Fetters and he had clashed upon the subject of the ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt


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