Guileless

If you are guileless, you are not a liar; you are innocent, and you might be a touch on the gullible side.

  • Pronunciation: /'gaɪllɪs/
  • English Description: characterized by honesty and fairness
  • Chinese Translation: 诚实的(cheng2 shi2 de)
  • Spanish Translation: inocente
  • STORY: To be guileless is to be without guile. Guile is "deceit, duplicity and trickery." The young and uninitiated are the ones we call guileless, and they are the ones who often get stung by the more heartless among us. You might recall being a guileless freshman trying out for the school play, and being told by a veteran performer that it would be best to come to the audition for Our Town in a chicken costume, so you did.

EXAMPLE SENTENCE:

  • As you wait for your aura of otherness to wear off, just be warm, be helpful, keep volunteering and be guileless in response to snark.
  • So behaviorists were great fans of the experiment, and there were no subjects more guileless, or more perfectly primed for observation, than children.

*New word description, story and part of "EXAMPLE SENTENCE" are cited in Vocabulary.com