Clever means quick to understand — you explain a thing once and the person has it. The child who works out the card trick, the friend who fixes your printer in four minutes.
It works on things as well as on people. A clever design, a clever answer, a clever bit of packaging that folds flat: there it means neat and ingenious rather than well-educated. In Britain clever is the ordinary word for intelligent, the one used about a school pupil; Americans say smart, and clever in American English leans towards ingenious or sly. That sly edge exists in Britain too, in fixed uses — do not get clever with me, too clever by half. And clever is about the speed of the mind, not the size of what is in it: a clever person can still know very little.
1adjectivecleverQuick at learning and understanding things.~37%
“She was the cleverest girl in her year.”
2adjectiveneatlyNeatly worked out; ingenious.~61%
“It is a clever design — the whole table folds into a suitcase.”
3adjectivepleasedToo pleased with your own quickness; smart in a way that annoys people.~2%
“Do not get clever with me, just answer the question.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: smart, intelligent
Clever came into standard English from East Anglian dialect, where cliver meant expert at seizing, and behind that lies a Middle English cliver, tenacious. The first clever people were quick with their hands — good at getting hold of things. The move from a fast grip to a fast mind is the whole story of the word.
Middle English
cliver — tenacious
English, today
clever
Built from
From East Anglian dialectal English cliver (“expert at seizing”), from Middle English cliver (“tenacious”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA