Guileless: meaning, example and synonyms
Guilelessadj. Innocent and without deception; free of cunning or trickery.
Example
The novel's guileless narrator reports the adults' schemes with such innocent precision that readers grasp the betrayals long before she does.
- Part of speech
- adjective
- Synonyms
- ingenuous, naive, artless, candid
- Antonyms
- cunning, crafty, deceitful, wily
- Memory tip
- Guile = cunning; guile-less = without any cunning at all.
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Check yourself: Guileless in context
The child's ______ question about why the guests were whispering revealed, without any intent to embarrass, the very secret the adults had tried to hide.
Answer: guileless. An innocent question asked with no intent to embarrass is guileless. Provocative implies intent to provoke, circumspect means cautious, cerebral means intellectual; none fit.
Con artists often target the ______, whose open trust in strangers makes them easy to deceive.
Answer: guileless. People with open trust and no cunning are guileless. Circumspect (cautious) people are hard to deceive; cerebral (intellectual) and felicitous (apt) don't describe trust.