How to Use wheedle in a Sentence

wheedle

verb
  • He wheedled quite a bit of money from her.
  • She pleaded and wheedled, but I wouldn't be swayed.
  • Sources refuse to go on the record, doors are slammed in reporters’ faces, shifty lawyers wheedle.
    — Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor, 17 Nov. 2022
  • Jordan begged and wheedled and cajoled to get his grandmother to part with the recipe.
    — Providence Cicero, The Seattle Times, 22 June 2017
  • His obsession was money—making it, hoarding it, wheedling it out of all and sundry.
    — Jody Rosen, The New Yorker, 7 Oct. 2023
  • People schemed, finagled, wheedled, and conspired, caught up in the mad, headlong rush of the city.
    — Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker, 27 Nov. 2023
  • Chef Albert was a restaurateur trying to wheedle a good review out of a tough restaurant critic.
    — Adam Harrington, CBS News, 1 Apr. 2026
  • Another is about a very loud teenage neighbor in the West Village who wheedles his way into her psyche.
    — Sophie Haigney, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 May 2018
  • Was there a certain competitive spirit in getting really good at reading the script and wheedling money out of people?
    — Daniel D'addario, Variety, 11 Aug. 2023
  • These are the result of ancient viruses that wheedled their way into our DNA, stayed there, and copied themselves again and again.
    — Ed Yong, The Atlantic, 10 May 2017
  • Leibovich is, more subtly, a brilliant interviewer able to wheedle not-quite-admissions from his subjects, who give him all the access in the world.
    — Joe Klein, Washington Post, 8 July 2022
  • In the final scenes, when Lucia and Mia wheedle their way into his suite for a threesome, Dom can’t hold onto his guilty conscience.
    — Chron, 6 Nov. 2022
  • Still, when the weather starts to feel more summery — however punishing that summer might be — burger cravings always seem to wheedle their way out of the woodwork.
    — Dominic Armato, azcentral, 28 May 2020
  • Andrew senses an opening to supplant Joseph as her emotional support, and a pretext to wheedle her into breaking up with her fiancé.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 16 June 2022
  • Kassar had wheedled an extra $40 million out of a European banking syndicate just so the film could cross the finish line.
    — Alex Ritman, Variety, 30 Oct. 2024
  • He and his voice have been described as aloof, eerily neutral, silky, wheedling, controlled, baleful, unisex, droll, soft, conversational, dreamy, supremely calm and rational.
    — Gerry Flahive, New York Times, 30 Mar. 2018
  • Belle was both, often within the same encounter, wheedling information out of Union officers while wearing Confederate garb, often to comic effect.
    — Kat Eschner, Smithsonian, 9 May 2017
  • Plaintive, breathless, and more than a little disappointed by the shabbiness of the place, Fagan is a nonthreatening figure, the sort of bloke who might wheedle a free pint in a Clerkenwell pub.
    — Graham Hillard, Washington Examiner, 10 Dec. 2020
  • Fall sustains many tonal expectations of the road-trip comedy and the coming-of-age tale, to startling effect, as Doe and Muna lie, steal, and wheedle their way through Turkey to reach the border.
    — Kate Erbland, IndieWire, 24 Jan. 2025
  • Harper rents a British country house to work through her trauma, but the men of the local village (all of whom are played by the actor Rory Kinnear) insinuate, belittle and wheedle her, too.
    — New York Times, 16 May 2022
  • Muffin, the show’s resident chaos-causing cousin, has been wheedled into filming an unboxing-style video by her father, Stripe, who has once again reached for the parenting stars but landed somewhere significantly south of his goal.
    — Vulture Staff, Vulture, 26 Dec. 2024
  • Just as Falstaff does with anyone within his character’s orbit, McKellen winningly winds the audience around his little finger, presenting a man now wheedling, now roaring, always to his own advantage.
    — David Benedict, Variety, 12 Apr. 2024
  • In a bid to rekindle the couple’s honeymoon phase, Yasmin troubleshoots by wheedling a chief executive role for him at payment processing company Tender (run by Max Minghella‘s inscrutable puppet-master Whitney Halberstram), and throwing her husband a lavish costume party for his 40th birthday.
    — Natalie Oganesyan, Deadline, 18 Jan. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'wheedle.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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