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View synonyms for sleight of hand

sleight of hand

noun

  1. skill in feats requiring quick and clever movements of the hands, especially for entertainment or deception, as jugglery, card or coin magic, etc.; legerdemain.
  2. the performance of such feats.
  3. a feat of legerdemain.
  4. skill in deception.


sleight of hand

noun

  1. manual dexterity used in performing conjuring tricks
  2. the performance of such tricks
“Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged” 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012


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Word History and Origins

Origin of sleight of hand1

Middle English word dating back to 1350–1400
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Idioms and Phrases

Trickery, deviousness, as in By some sleight of hand they managed to overlook all bonuses . This term alludes to the performance of magic tricks with the hands. Its figurative use dates from about 1700.
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Example Sentences

Like any good suspense novelist, Shields is a master of evasion and sleight-of-hand.

Catching Fire perpetuates an ideological vision that, today, is a sleight-of-hand.

This option creates bad optics as well, because it looks like the old pork-barrel log rolling and legislative sleight-of-hand.

In the smoke and mirrors of the fashion world, Wang is an expert at sleight-of-hand.

The old sleight-of-hand expert had stolen it, sure, and slipped it under his robe.

Just think: after five years of desertion, and trouble without end, and it all put right by a little sleight-of-hand.

He shot out his hand and produced his watch with the celerity of a sleight-of-hand performer.

Nature fills her baskets by the same sleight-of-hand, and the observer must be on the alert who would possess her secret.

Need you be surprised then, that a sleight-of-hand man, a manipulator of goblets, requires accomplices?

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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