Beguile

bɪˈɡaɪl

verb

to charm or enchant someone in a deceptive way

The word 'beguile' comes from the Middle English term 'biguil,' which means 'to deceive.' It is often used to describe the act of charming or enchanting someone, usually in a cunning or misleading manner.

Will you?” She was so eager and pretty that the Paladin said straight out that he would; and then as none of the rest had bravery enough to expose the fear that was in him, one volunteered after the other with a prompt mouth and a sick heart till all were shipped for the voyage; then the girl clapped her hands in glee, and the parents were gratified, too, saying that the ghosts of their house had been a dread and a misery to them and their forebears for generations, and nobody had ever been found yet who was willing to confront them and find out what their trouble was, so that the family could heal it and content the poor specters and beguile them to tranquillity and peace.

Mark Twain

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

He let the dwarf beguile him with that glib tongue of his.

George R. R. Martin

A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five

could I tell the wonders of an isle That in that fairest lake had placed been, I could e’en Dido of her grief beguile; Or rob from aged Lear his bitter teen: For sure so fair a place was never seen, Of all that ever charm’d romantic eye: It seem’d an emerald in the silver sheen Of the bright waters; or as when on high, Through clouds of fleecy white, laughs the cœrulean sky.

John Keats

Poetry

A great multitude had already assembled; the windows were filled with people, smoking and playing cards to beguile the time; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling, joking.

Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist

I tailgate them every chance I get; it makes them mad.” She smiled a secret, cunning, lovely little impish smile at him, as if trying to beguile him into her strange reality, where she tailgated and tailgated a slow truck and got madder and madder and more impatient and then, when it pulled off, instead of shooting on by like other drivers would, she pulled off too, and stole everything the truck had on it.

Dick, Philip K.

A Scanner Darkly

Often, when she woke, Jo found Beth reading in her well-worn little book, heard her singing softly, to beguile the sleepless night, or saw her lean her face upon her hands, while slow tears dropped through the transparent fingers; and Jo would lie watching her, with thoughts too deep for tears, feeling that Beth, in her simple, unselfish way, was trying to wean herself from the dear old life, and fit herself for the life to come, by sacred words of comfort, quiet prayers, and the music she loved so well.

Louisa May Alcott

Little Women

Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own.

Victor Hugo

Les Misérables

Not Youth Pertains to Me Not youth pertains to me, Nor delicatesse, I cannot beguile the time with talk, Awkward in the parlor, neither a dancer nor elegant, In the learn’d coterie sitting constrain’d and still, for learning inures not to me, Beauty, knowledge, inure not to me—yet there are two or three things inure to me, I have nourish’d the wounded and sooth’d many a dying soldier, And at intervals waiting or in the midst of camp, Composed these songs.

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass

Leto had but to relax his inner barriers in the presence of this music and he would hear memories from those times when Gurney had employed the baliset to beguile his friend and charge, Paul Atreides.

Frank Herbert

Children of Dune

who this good banquet grace; 'Tis sweet to play the fool in time and place, And wine can of their wits the wise beguile, Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile, The grave in merry measures frisk about, And many a long-repented word bring out.

Homer

The Odyssey

He let the dwarf beguile him with that glib tongue of his.

Martin, George, R. R.

A Dance With Dragons

It may be one more phantom to beguile The brain-sick dreamer with its harlot smile.” “I have not smiled,” she said.

C. S. Lewis

Poetry

This, then, sirs, is to be a knight-errant, and what I have spoken of is the order of his chivalry, of which, as I have already said, I, though a sinner, have made profession, and what the aforesaid knights professed that same do I profess, and so I go through these solitudes and wilds seeking adventures, resolved in soul to oppose my arm and person to the most perilous that fortune may offer me in aid of the weak and needy.” By these words of his the travellers were able to satisfy themselves of Don Quixote’s being out of his senses and of the form of madness that overmastered him, at which they felt the same astonishment that all felt on first becoming acquainted with it; and Vivaldo, who was a person of great shrewdness and of a lively temperament, in order to beguile the short journey which they said was required to reach the mountain, the scene of the burial, sought to give him an opportunity of going on with his absurdities.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Don Quixote