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Allin

wary

adjectiveverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈwɛə.ɹi//
  • United States//ˈwɛɚ.i//
  • Australia//ˈweːɹi//
  • New Zealand//ˈweəɹi//
  • //ˈwiəɹi//

Cautious of danger; carefully watching and guarding against deception, trickery, and dangers; suspiciously prudent

adjective

  1. 1

    Cautious of danger; carefully watching and guarding against deception, trickery, and dangers; suspiciously prudent

    He is wary of dogs.

  2. 2

    Characterized by caution; guarded; careful; on one's guard

  3. 3

    thrifty, provident

Etymology

From the adjective ware + -y.

verb

  1. 1

    To curse, revile.

Etymology

From Middle English warien, from Old English wierġan (“to curse, do evil”), from Proto-West Germanic *wargijan, from Proto-Germanic *wargijaną (“to condemn, curse”), from Proto-Germanic *wargaz (“criminal”). Doublet of warry.

Forms

comparative
warier
superlative
wariest
past tense
waried
past participle
waried
present participle
warying
third person singular
waries
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).