knavishly

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knave

(nāv)

1. An unprincipled, crafty fellow.

a. A male servant.

b. A man of humble birth.

3. Games See jack.

[Middle English, from Old English cnafa, boy, male servant.]

knav′ish adj.

knav′ish·ly adv.

knav′ish·ness n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Adv.

knavishly - in an artful manner; "he craftily arranged to be there when the decision was announced"; "had ever circumstances conspired so cunningly?"

craftily, foxily, slyly, trickily, cunningly, artfully

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References in periodicals archive ?

In consequence, 'experts and pontiffs [...] are given the unenviable choice between the Scylla of confessing themselves fools and the Charybdis of earning their livings as knavishly as any painter of new Old Masters'.

As the forger Han van Meegeren went on trial for his fake Vermeers in 1947, Apollo admonished a complicit art world

Shakespeare lets his audience believe what they want about the relationship between the two forms of drama as the scene knavishly makes and mars the polemical narratives of the theater's most vituperative enemies.

"Here's a knocking indeed!": Macbeth and the Harrowing of Hell

Shakespeare used it: 'How now my pretty knave, how dost thou?' Yet by 1545 the word was already being deployed unequivocally in its pejorative sense, 'to steal like a knave' or 'to force knavishly'.