cunning

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• adjective Marked by or given to artful subtlety and deceptiveness.
• adjective Executed with or exhibiting ingenuity.
• adjective Delicately pleasing; pretty or cute.
• noun Skill in deception; guile.
• noun Skill or adeptness in execution or performance; dexterity.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A variant of cony.
• noun The river-lamprey.
• noun Knowledge; learning; special knowledge: sometimes implying occult or magical knowledge.
• noun Practical knowledge or experience; skill; dexterity.
• noun Practical skill employed in a secret or crafty manner; craft; artifice; skilful deceit.
• noun Disposition to employ one's skill in an artful manner; craftiness; guile; artifice.
• noun The natural wit or instincts of an animal: as, the cunning of the fox or hare.
• Knowing; having knowledge; learned; having or concerned with special or strange knowledge, and hence sometimes with an implication of magical or supernatural knowledge. See cunning-man, cunning-woman.
• Having knowledge acquired by experience or practice; having technical knowledge and manual skill; skilful; dexterous.
• Exhibiting or wrought with ingenuity; skilful; curious; ingenious.
• Characterized by or exercising crafty ingenuity; artfully subtle or shrewd; knowing in guile; guileful; tricky.
• Marked by crafty ingenuity; showing shrewdness or guile; expressive of subtlety: as, a cunning deception; cunning looks.
• Curiously or quaintly attractive; subtly interesting; piquant: commonly used of something small or young: as, the cunning ways of a child or a pet animal.
• Synonyms Cunning, Artful, Sly, Subtle, Shrewd, Tricky, Adroit, Wily, Crafty, Intriguing, sharp, foxy. All these words suggest something underhand or deceptive. Cunning, literally knowing, and especially knowing how, now implies a disposition to compass one's ends by concealment; hence we speak of a fox-like cunning. Artful indicates greater ingenuity and ability, the latter, however, being of a low kind. Sly is the same as cunning, except that it is more vulgar and implies less ability. (“A col-fox, ful of sleigh iniquité.” Chaucer, Nun's Priest's Tale, l. 395.) (“Envy works in a sly, imperceptible manner.” Watts.) Subtle implies concealment, like cunning, but also a marked ability and the power to work out one's plans without being suspected; hence, while cunning is applicable to brutes, subtle is too high a word for that, except by figurative use. The rabbit is cunning enough to hide from the dog; Mephistopheles is subtle. (For the favorable meanings of subtle, see astute. For the good senses of shrewd, see acute.) In its unfavorable aspects shrewd implies a penetration and judgment that are somewhat narrow and worldly-wise, too much so to deserve the name of sagacity or wisdom. (See astute.) Tricky is especially a word of action; it expresses the character and conduct of one who gets the confidence of others only to abuse it by acts of selfishness, especially cheating. Adroit, in a bad sense, expresses a ready and skilful use of trickery, or facility in performing and escaping detection of reprehensihle acts. (See adroit.) Wily is appropriate where a person is viewed as an opponent in real or figurative warfare, against whom wiles or stratagems are employed: a wily adversary is one who is full of such devices; a wily politician is one who is notably given to advancing party interests by leading the opposite side to commit blunders, etc. A crafty man has less ability than a subtle man, and works more by deception or knavery than the shrewd man; he is more active than the cunning man, and more steadily active than the sly man; he is on the moral level of the trickish man. Intriguing is applied where the plots are secret arrangements made with others, perhaps against a third party, and especially of a complicated character.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• adjective Knowing; skillful; dexterous.
• adjective Wrought with, or exhibiting, skill or ingenuity; ingenious; curious.
• adjective Crafty; sly; artful; designing; deceitful.
• adjective Colloq. U.S. Pretty or pleasing.
• noun Archaic Knowledge; art; skill; dexterity.
• noun The faculty or act of using stratagem to accomplish a purpose; fraudulent skill or dexterity; deceit; craft.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• adjective Sly; crafty; clever in surreptitious behaviour.
• adjective Skillful, artful.
• adjective rare Cute, appealing.
• noun obsolete Knowledge; learning; special knowledge (sometimes implying occult or magical knowledge).
• noun Practical knowledge or experience; aptitude in performance; skill, proficiency; dexterity.
• noun Practical skill employed in a secret or crafty manner; craft; artifice; skillful deceit.
• noun The disposition to employ one's skill in an artful manner; craftiness; guile; artifice; skill of being cunning, sly, conniving, or deceitful.
• noun The natural wit or instincts of an animal.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun crafty artfulness (especially in deception)
• noun shrewdness as demonstrated by being skilled in deception
• adjective attractive especially by means of smallness or prettiness or quaintness
• adjective marked by skill in deception
• adjective showing inventiveness and skill