elude
Often confused with allude
- 1To escape from or avoid someone or something, especially by cleverness or skill, as when shaking off a pursuer.
Smugglers learned to elude the coast guard by sailing on moonless nights.
The suspect eluded capture for months by switching cars and never sleeping in the same town twice.
Similarevade, escape, avoid, dodge
Note
The trickery is built into the word: Latin ēlūdō joins ē-, "out of", to lūdō, "to play" or "to trick", so to elude someone is, at root, to play your way out of their grasp. The verb also stretches to things that were never caught at all: a trophy that eludes a team for years, a closing date that has eluded research.
- 2To be beyond someone's understanding; to resist being understood by someone.
Some of the finer points of tax law elude even experienced accountants.
The appeal of opera has always eluded him, no matter how many performances he sits through.
Note
The grammar runs the other way from understand: the puzzle is the subject and the puzzled person is the object, as in calculus eludes me. That ordering makes the difficulty sound like a property of the subject rather than a failing of the reader, which is why the verb suits polite admissions. Even and still often sharpen it: the point eludes even experts.
- 3To escape someone's memory, so that they cannot call it to mind; to slip someone's mind.
The names of my old classmates elude me, though I can still picture their faces.
The new password eluded him, so he had to reset it again.
Similarescape
Practice
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Origin
From Latin ēlūdō ("to evade, elude"), from ē- ("out of", a short form of ex-) + lūdō ("to play; to trick").