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elude
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
elude
verb
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
always
▪ At the time I had wondered why this main theme somehow always eluded me, why the great events never materialized.
▪ The balance of creativity and business skill needed to smoothly administer the operations would in fact always elude the pair.
still
▪ So, even moderate fame still eluded him, and Nicholson remained unknown outside of a small Hollywood clique.
▪ An invitation to Muirfield still eluded me.
▪ But the most sought-after smell - the one which women find irresistible - still eludes the experts.
▪ The perfect song still eludes me.
▪ Nine singles and one album had been released, but success still eluded him.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Despite a $25,000 reward on his head, he continues to elude the authorities.
▪ Jones eluded the police for six weeks.
▪ Lt. Forney managed to elude capture by enemy forces for several weeks.
▪ The distinction between the two philosophies largely eludes me.
▪ Till now a college degree has eluded her.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Desperately, the Doctor tries a series of random landings in the hope of eluding their pursuers.
▪ Fame she achieved; fortune eluded her.
▪ Finally, he made a calculation, the nature of which eluded Dougal, and scribbled a number on the pad.
▪ It was a mystery that had eluded the intellectual efforts of Isaac Newton and teased the mind of Albert Einstein.
▪ Morphology of individual colonic pressure waves has eluded reliable classification.
▪ Or will he have the success that eludes the smart boys of Tin Pan Alley?
▪ The trappings of management elude us at first.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Elude

Elude \E*lude"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Eluded; p. pr. & vb. n. Eluding.] [L. eludere, elusum; e + ludere to play: cf. F. To avoid slyly, by artifice, stratagem, or dexterity; to escape from in a covert manner; to mock by an unexpected escape; to baffle; as, to elude an officer; to elude detection, inquiry, search, comprehension; to elude the force of an argument or a blow.

Me gentle Delia beckons from the plain, Then, hid in shades, eludes he eager swain.
--Pope.

The transition from fetichism to polytheism seems a gradual process of which the stages elude close definition.
--Tylor.

Syn: To evade; avoid; escape; shun; eschew; flee; mock; baffle; frustrate; foil.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
elude

1530s, "delude, make a fool of," from Latin eludere "finish play, win at play; escape from or parry (a blow), make a fool of, mock, frustrate; win from at play," from assimilated form of ex- "out, away" (see ex-) + ludere "to play" (see ludicrous). Sense of "evade" is first recorded 1610s in a figurative sense, 1630s in a literal one. Related: Eluded; eludes; eluding.

Wiktionary
elude

vb. 1 (context transitive English) To evade, or escape from someone or something, especially by using cunning or skill. 2 (context transitive English) To shake off a pursuer; to give someone the slip.

WordNet
elude
  1. v. escape, either physically or mentally; "The thief eluded the police"; "This difficult idea seems to evade her"; "The event evades explanation" [syn: evade, bilk]

  2. be incomprehensible to; escape understanding by; "What you are seeing in him eludes me" [syn: escape]

  3. avoid or try to avoid fulfilling, answering, or performing (duties, questions, or issues); "He dodged the issue"; "she skirted the problem"; "They tend to evade their responsibilities"; "he evaded the questions skillfully" [syn: hedge, fudge, evade, put off, circumvent, parry, skirt, dodge, duck, sidestep]

Usage examples of "elude".

As much as I would like to tell you that there is no danger, that Seregil and Alec eluded their pursuers completely, I cannot be certain of it.

So I abandoned my original work and began the greater one, even though I had amassed considerable material by that stage and publication would, undoubtedly, have gained me both the fame in the world and the patronage of the mighty which have forever eluded my grasp.

But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

Eugenia said, if, indeed, she could not conquer her aversion, she saw no way to elude the baronet, but by openly confessing her repugnance, in the conversation he demanded.

He would not become a pitiful bufflehead who pined and whimpered over a female who had eluded his grasp.

Valmarana, who told me that, if he had been aware that the sanitary line could be eluded, he would never have impugned my veracity, and thanked me for the information I had given him.

He eluded Dibs and got to the toilet, and by now the whole place was astir with shadow-figures like a scene out of a gold-lighted hell.

Combe, who was seated near me, shook his head in token of disapprobation, but Henriette did not try to elude the question.

What do you think she did to elude the law, and at the same time avenge herself?

So far, he has managed to elude my diplodocus, but I have another creature that will surely capture him.

He had been tracking the beast and still the drack managed to elude him.

I am inclined to attribute it to a certain frame of mind, an awareness of suspicious circumstances that elude persons of duller wit.

Gradus is discursively seduced in a way that makes the seeming distinction between him and Kinbote, as well as that between the baroque and the simple, the cultured and the barbarous, the homosexual and the heterosexual, and the roughly masculine and the decadently effeminized, appear to be nothing more than the product of an obsessive and pedantic imagination which insists on impressing its own absurdly reductive schema on a disorderly world that consistently eludes it.

It contained James and his son-in-law Dartie, a fine man, with a square chest, buttoned very tightly into a frock coat, and a sallow, fattish face adorned with dark, well-curled moustaches, and that incorrigible commencement of whisker which, eluding the strictest attempts at shaving, seems the mark of something deeply ingrained in the personality of the shaver, being especially noticeable in men who speculate.

Always, though he would remember and see again the images of the forest he saw in the shadowless light of gloaming, the song would elude him except as the half-remembered laughter of wind in the trees.