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Another word for artifice

a-z
Noun

  1. An indirect, usually cunning means of gaining an end

      1. The act or an instance of swindling or cheating; a deception.
      1. A playful or mischievous act; a prank:
      2. An underhanded act or deceitful remark:
      1. A stratagem or trick intended to deceive or ensnare.
      2. A disarming or seductive manner, device, or procedure:
      3. To influence or lead by means of wiles; entice:
      1. An act or procedure intended to achieve an end by deceptive or fraudulent means.
      2. A mischievous action; a prank:
      3. A stupid, disgraceful, or childish act:
      1. Deception used to achieve an end:
      2. A deceptive stratagem or device:
      1. A scheme or maneuver designed to achieve an objective, as in surprising an enemy or deceiving someone.
      2. The devising or execution of such schemes or maneuvers:
      1. Deftness; dexterity.
      2. A clever or skillful trick or deception; an artifice or stratagem.
      1. A crafty stratagem; a subterfuge.
      1. An action calculated to frustrate an opponent or gain an advantage indirectly or deviously; a maneuver:
      1. A movement or combination of movements involving skill and dexterity:
      2. A controlled change in movement or direction of a moving vehicle or vessel, as in the flight path of an aircraft.
      3. A strategic or tactical military or naval movement.
      1. Any of various lively dances in triple time.
      2. The music for such a dance.
      3. A joke or trick. Used chiefly in the phrase The jig is up.
      1. The act or instance of engaging in deception under an assumed name or identity.
      1. A device employed to cheat, deceive, or trick, especially a mechanism for the secret and dishonest control of gambling apparatus.
      2. An innovative or unusual mechanical contrivance; a gadget.
      3. An innovative stratagem or scheme employed especially to promote a project:
      1. A military attack or maneuver that is meant to divert attention away from a planned point of attack.
      2. A body movement that is intended to divert another's attention, often by being deliberately left uncompleted:
      3. A deceptive action calculated to divert attention from one's real purpose.
      1. To avoid (a blow, for example) by moving or shifting quickly aside.
      2. To evade (an obligation, for example) by cunning, trickery, or deceit:
      3. To blunt or reduce the intensity of (a section of a photograph) by shading during the printing process.
      1. A contrivance or invention serving a particular purpose, especially a machine used to perform one or more relatively simple tasks.
      2. A literary contrivance, such as parallelism or personification, used to achieve a particular effect.
      3. A decorative design, figure, or pattern, as one used in embroidery.
      1. The use of deceit.
      2. The fact or state of being deceived.
      3. A ruse; a trick.
    See also:

    means

    honest

  2. Deceitful cleverness

    See also:

    means

    honest

© Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Another word for artifice

Noun

  1. Maneuver

      1. A crafty stratagem; a subterfuge.
      1. A stratagem or trick intended to deceive or ensnare.
      2. A disarming or seductive manner, device, or procedure:
      3. To influence or lead by means of wiles; entice:
      1. An act or procedure intended to achieve an end by deceptive or fraudulent means.
      2. A mischievous action; a prank:
      3. A stupid, disgraceful, or childish act:
      1. A scheme or maneuver designed to achieve an objective, as in surprising an enemy or deceiving someone.
      2. The devising or execution of such schemes or maneuvers:
    See also:

    trick

  2. Trickery

    See also:

    dishonesty

    cunning

  3. Skill

    See also:

    trick

    art

    See syn. study at

    art

    ability

© WEBSTER’S NEW WORLD® ROGET’S A-Z THESAURUS by Charlton Laird and the editors of Webster’s New World dictionaries. Copyright © 1999 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Sentence Examples

  • Gibbon's stylistic artifice both averted the peril of prosecution and rendered the attack more telling.

  • He had not attempted to include in his calculations the orbital variations of the disturbing bodies; but Lagrange, by the happy artifice of transferring the origin of coordinates from the centre of the sun to the centre of gravity of the sun and planets, obtained a simplification of the formulae, by which the same analysis was rendered equally applicable to each of the planets severally.

  • Henry, who saw through the artifice, and was already looking round for a more popular successor to Wolsey, made the gracious answer that he would employ More otherwise.

  • The style of the whole book is nervous, vivid, free from artifice and rhetoric, obeying the writer's thought with absolute plasticity.

  • In this he succeeded, though not without a good deal of artifice, more creditable to his ingenuity than to his virtue.

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Words that mention artifice in the Dictionary

Words near artifice in the Thesaurus