Elusive

How to spell elusive

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce elusive

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does elusive mean?

1. adjectiveDifficult to find, catch, or achieve; tending to escape grasp or understanding.

Elusive in a sentence

• The detective spent years chasing the elusive suspect across three countries.

• A good night of sleep felt elusive during the busy exam period.

Where does elusive come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Elusive comes from the Latin verb eludere, which meant 'to escape from' or 'to frustrate', and which was built from ex-, meaning 'out' or 'away', plus ludere, meaning 'to play'. So the literal idea behind it was something like 'to play one's way out of' a difficulty, the sense of slipping cleverly past whatever was trying to catch you. English took the past participle stem elus- and added the adjective ending -ive in the middle of the eighteenth century to describe anything that tends to evade capture or understanding. The same playful ludere root surfaces in a whole family of relatives, including 'illusion', 'delude', and 'ludicrous', all of which carry a faint echo of play or trickery. Knowing that the single 's' belongs to that Latin lus stem, rather than the doubled 's' people sometimes expect, is a handy way to keep the spelling straight.

How the word is built

• e- (variant of ex-, meaning 'out, away')
• lus (from Latin ludere, 'to play')
• -ive (adjective suffix)