Shifty; tricky

Usage examples of devious.

Prussian cavalry, then we could partition the Japans without a hiccup and have done with all their devious stupidity and time-wasting bad manners.

Ramage felt he was in no hurry to get to the flagship: he was tired of the Admiral Rudds of this world, devious men who never said what they really thought, and who never thought fairly in any case.

To all Boers it is an historical spot, for it was at its base that the wagons of the Voortrekkers, coming by devious ways from various parts, assembled.

Perhaps a work which should chronicle the opposite course, which should trace out all the devious courses through which a man of the world, a man of ambitions, drags his conscience, just steering clear of crime that he may gain his end and yet save appearances, such a chronicle would be no less edifying and no less dramatic.

I had had, I thought, good success in my early experiments, but the outcome was thwarted by some antivivisectionists who were convinced that I was using the cats for cruel, devious pranks, and the two females which I thought I had impregnated disappeared forever beyond my control.

The goddess is too heavy-handed, too ensnared by emotion, to think with such devious, insidious clarity.

A silent moon loomed low in the sky, throwing long and devious shadows from every fencepost and tree.

Gift and Flower in their tourist travels also heard one whispered rumor to the effect that some actual berserker machines, imported along devious trade routes from who knows where, by unknown means, had been and were still being brought into close contact with Solarian society.

They will stay out there on the street until whenever, in dumb hats and seam-busted zootsuits, looking fantastically greedy and devious, and fooling no one.

Even Aimee had a bit of that in her, but in her it took a slower, more devious form.

Tuesday in a 27-count indictment involving ambitiously devious bank fraud.

This had been the home of Azran, and she already knew too well how devious he had been.

In booths and at tables and the long bar were toothless bunco steerers, addict-pushers, and devious pimps.

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.

Out of a far and devious past and the corridors of Ruhkarv had come a creature, intelligent or not, ruler of those ways once, or a prowler in them, as great an enemy to the builders as it was to the Fauklow men, which had had the energy to revive and attack its arousers.