WORD OF THE DAY
To beguile is to entertain and convince by flattery. Someone who beguiles is tricky and often charming, like when a smooth-talking friend tries to beguile you into giving them your allowance.
The word beguile is from Middle English, and while guile involves deceit, to beguile means to spend time pleasantly, even if it involves trickery. If someone beguiles you for an afternoon, you were amused, entertained, or otherwise pleased. The word can also have a darker tone, as when the person who beguiled you for the afternoon was actually trying to steal your car. Con artists and cat videos tend to beguile people.
Want to expand your vocabulary?
Get Word of the Day delivered straight to your inbox!
Vocabulary lists containing beguile
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
Looking to build your vocabulary? Then practice this list of 300 "hard words" — the kind that used to be tested on the SAT before 2016. If you're a high school student prepping for the SAT, check out Vocabulary.com's Roadmap to the SAT, which focuses on the vocabulary you'll need to ace today's SAT test.
The speaker of this poem, who is mourning a lost love, is visited in the night by a raven who speaks a single word: "Nevermore." Read the full text here. Click here to explore other works by Edgar Allan Poe.
In this tragedy, Macbeth's belief in a prophecy and his ambition to become king lead to murder and madness.
Sparks fly when Romeo and Juliet first meet, but their families are sworn enemies locked in an ancient feud. Learn these words from Shakespeare's classic tale of star-crossed love.
