askance
You may have trouble watching a gory horror movie, but you also won't be able to look away. Find a happy medium by looking askance, or subtly out of the corner of your eye.
First used in the 1500's, no one is quite sure where the cockeyed, slanting adverb askance came from. Some people suspect that it evolved from the Latin a scancio, meaning “obliquely, slantingly,” while others argue that it’s just a variant of the word askew. How fitting for a word that describes a suspicious or distrusting manner of looking that we can't trace its etymology with any surety.
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with suspicion or disapproval“he looked askance at the offer”
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with a side or oblique glance“did not quite turn all the way back but looked askance at me with her dark eyes”
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(used especially of glances) directed to one side with or as if with doubt or suspicion or envy
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Vocabulary lists containing askance
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Noor and Sal — two Pakistani American teenagers living in a small town — are falling in love as they struggle with difficult family issues.
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