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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
evasive
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
action
▪ A party of puffins had to take evasive action as they nearly flew into the side of the ship.
▪ If the Nations Air crew had been alerted, it might not have had to take evasive action.
▪ He poised himself, blade weaving defensively before him, ready to take instant evasive action.
▪ All of us realised that there was nothing we could do, no evasive action we could take.
▪ And all creatures who hear it in time take their own appropriate, evasive action.
▪ He could neither move to attack nor take evasive action.
▪ The alarm call stimulates other nearby blackbirds to take evasive action.
▪ When the current recession gripped, they decided to take evasive action.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ All their questions were met with vague, evasive answers.
▪ an evasive answer
▪ When we asked him where his wife was, O'Hare suddenly became evasive.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And the bird's standard evasive tactic is ill-suited to the airport.
▪ And these narrative solutions are invariably negative or evasive.
▪ Blood had been spilt this time despite all the evasive tactics and diplomacy.
▪ Courtroom observers described him as alternately charming and evasive.
▪ It had been a strange conversation: Riverton was nervous, evasive.
▪ She's quite vague, even evasive about it.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
evasive

evasive \e*va"sive\ ([-e]*v[=a]"s[i^]v), a. [Cf. F. ['e]vasif. See Evade.] Tending to evade, or marked by evasion; elusive; shuffling; avoiding by artifice.

Thus he, though conscious of the ethereal guest, Answered evasive of the sly request.
--Pope.

Stammered out a few evasive phrases.
--Macaulay. -- E*va"sive*ly, adv. -- E*va"sive*ness, n.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
evasive

1725 of persons; 1744 of actions, etc., from French évasif, from Latin evas-, past participle stem of evadere "to get away, escape" (see evasion). Related: Evasively; evasiveness. Evasive action is from 1940, originally in military aviation.\n

Wiktionary
evasive

a. 1 Tending to avoid speaking openly or making revelations about oneself. 2 Directed towards avoidance or escape; ''evasive action''.

WordNet
evasive
  1. adj. deliberately vague or ambiguous; "his answers were brief, constrained and evasive"; "an evasive statement"

  2. avoiding or escaping from difficulty or danger especially enemy fire; "pilots are taught to take evasive action"

  3. skillful at eluding capture; "a cabal of conspirators, each more elusive than the archterrorist"- David Kline [syn: elusive]

Wikipedia

Usage examples of "evasive".

Hearing the synchronized voices repeat the same formulas, evasive, affectless, cut off from whatever they had once been by promises of what they would never get to collect on?

Felix, who disdained even to give an evasive answer, was at length beheaded at Venusia, in Lucania, a place on which the birth of Horace has conferred fame.

Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never took evasive action going in to the target and thereby increased the danger of all the men who flew in the same formation with him.

Everybody, understanding the shrewdness of this evasive answer, laughed again, and Juliette herself could not help joining in the general merriment.

There, under two green umbrellas, like two fat rajahs in their shaking howdahs upon the backs of two white elephants, the friends would sit in solemn equanimity awaiting the evasive cunner, the vagrant perch or cod or the occasional flirtatious eel.

Equally ponderous and evasive, Don is one of the many middlemen hired to interpose between Hef and the outside world.

Horrified, Lala automatically began evasive action in her Elmeth and concentrated her thoughts on the missiles.

Voices, commands, laughter: for an hour activity prevailed in the nihilation area, while the target plane flew over the city again from the sea side, slipped away from the searchlights, and, caught again, became a Platonic target: The Number 6 manned the fuze setter, trying with cranks to make two mechanical pointers coincide with two electrical pointers and unflinchingly nihilating the evasive essent.

Stella grew evasive about her teens, or what had brought her to the carnival where Johnny had found her, but she talked freely about the work she had done.

Twisting the control stick, he began evasive maneuvers, tilting the plane to the right, then the left, veering, spinning, diving: Other guards began shooting.

And while Minks bumped down in his third-class crowded carriage to Sydenham, hunting his evasive sonnet, Henry Rogers glided swiftly in a taxi-cab to his rooms in St.

The huge carrier machines had been unable to maneuver in pursuit of any offensive goal, their engines silently churning space while they concentrated on evasive action, dodging wave after wave of outclassed livecrewed ships.

Max Koblin had calmed down sufficiently to offer an evasive explanation, the guests trooped back to the piazza, and three games of auction pinocle, which had started in the dining-room after the tables had been cleared, came to an abrupt close.

The patrols reported that at times a metal sphere, at times a humanoid creature five hundred miles in length, was moving through the nebula, that it was speaking to itself about this and that, but concerning its statehood it gave evasive answers.

Alien answered, choosing the largest piece of territory he could think of in the hope that Torry would not pursue the conversation by asking which part of it, compelling him either to lie or be unconvincingly evasive.