Clever

How to spell clever

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce clever

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does clever mean?

1. adjectiveQuick to understand, learn, or devise solutions; mentally sharp or ingenious.

Clever in a sentence

• Her clever solution saved the team several hours of work.

• The engineer designed a clever mechanism that folded flat for storage.

Where does clever come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Clever is a curiously slippery word whose earliest traces appear in Middle English as 'cliver', probably linked to the dialectal verb 'cliven', meaning 'to cling' or 'to grip', so the original idea may have been of someone quick to seize or get hold of things. Some etymologists connect it to the East Anglian word 'cliver', meaning nimble or dexterous with the hands, while others suspect an Old Norse or Low German source for the underlying root. It was rare in writing for centuries, then surged into common use in the 1700s, when it broadened from 'manually skilful' to the modern sense of mentally sharp or ingenious. Because its history is genuinely tangled, dictionaries usually flag the origin as uncertain rather than tidy. The spelling stays mercifully phonetic, with the only mild trap being the unstressed '-er' ending that some writers might be tempted to render as '-or'.

How the word is built

• clever (single root; no productive prefix or suffix)