clever

clever (klĕvʹər) adjective

cleverer, cleverest

[Middle English cliver; akin to East Frisian klifer, klüfer, perhaps from klūfen, to gnaw apart, work assiduously, of Low German origin; akin to Old Saxon klioban, to split, cleave.]

clevʹerly adverb

clevʹerness noun

Synonyms: clever, ingenious, shrewd. These adjectives are compared as they refer to mental adroitness or to practical ingenuity and skill. Clever, the most comprehensive, stresses mental quickness or adeptness: "If I ever felt inclined to be timid as I was going into a room full of people, I would say to myself, You're the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world, why should you be frightened?" (Beatrice Webb). Ingenious implies originality and inventiveness: "an ingenious solution to the storage problem" (Linda Greider). Shrewd emphasizes mental astuteness and practical understanding: "a woman of shrewd intellect and masculine character" (Leslie Stephen).

Regional Note: In the 17th and 18th centuries, in addition to its basic sense of "able to use the brain readily and effectively," the word clever acquired a constellation of imprecise but generally positive senses in regional British speech: "clean-limbed and handsome,""neat and convenient to use," and "of an agreeable disposition." Some of these British regional senses, brought over when America was colonized, are still found in American regional speech, as in the South, where clever can mean "good-natured, amiable," in old-fashioned speech. The speech of New England extends the meaning "good-natured" to animals in the specific sense of "easily managed, docile." Perhaps it was the association with animals that gave rise to another meaning, "affable but not especially smart," applicable to people when used in old-fashioned New England dialects.

Word History: Being too clever is thought to be unwise, and support for this popular notion may be afforded by the fact that the devil seems to have been the first "clever" one in English. The source of our word clever is probably the Middle English word cliver, recorded only once in a work written before 1250, in which it is said that the devil is "cliver on sinnes." This means something like "skillful in respect to sins."Cliver probably goes back to the Indo-European root gleubh-,"to cut, cleave." Although the intermediate ancestry of cliver is unclear, the semantic connection has to do with penetration or incisivenessthat is, cutting through to the heart of the matter, just as a woodcarver cuts through material in order to realize a certain vision.