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SKILFUL
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I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Having or showing knowledge and skill and aptitude
Example:
the effect was achieved by skillful retouching
Synonyms:
adept; expert; good; practiced; proficient; skilful; skillful
Classified under:
Similar:
skilled (having or showing or requiring special skill)
Context examples:
And now it is deluged with a nectarous flood—the young germs swamped—delicious poison cankering them: now I see myself stretched on an ottoman in the drawing-room at Vale Hall at my bride Rosamond Oliver's feet: she is talking to me with her sweet voice—gazing down on me with those eyes your skilful hand has copied so well—smiling at me with these coral lips.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
None the less, his success continued, and the less skilful hunters were often kept busy hauling in his meat.
(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)
The plan pleased him much, and he soon became such a skilful star-gazer, that when he had served out his time, and wanted to leave his master, he gave him a glass, and said, With this you can see all that is passing in the sky and on earth, and nothing can be hidden from you.
(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)
I left my poor wife big with child, and accepted an advantageous offer made me to be captain of the Adventurer, a stout merchantman of 350 tons: for I understood navigation well, and being grown weary of a surgeon’s employment at sea, which, however, I could exercise upon occasion, I took a skilful young man of that calling, one Robert Purefoy, into my ship.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
When the chair was not in use, it reposed on top of the bed, though sometimes he sat on the chair when cooking, reading a book while the water boiled, and even becoming skilful enough to manage a paragraph or two while steak was frying.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
He had once been a skilful sculptor and had earned an honest living, but he had taken to evil courses and had twice already been in jail—once for a petty theft, and once, as we had already heard, for stabbing a fellow-countryman.
(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
But the king made the most skilful workmen in his kingdom weave the three dresses: one golden, like the sun; another silvery, like the moon; and a third sparkling, like the stars: and his hunters were told to hunt out all the beasts in his kingdom, and to take the finest fur out of their skins: and thus a mantle of a thousand furs was made.
(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)
The artist himself was at that time busy upon two great designs; the first, to sow land with chaff, wherein he affirmed the true seminal virtue to be contained, as he demonstrated by several experiments, which I was not skilful enough to comprehend.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
So, for example, if I should say, in a letter to a friend, ‘Our brother Tom has just got the piles,’ a skilful decipherer would discover, that the same letters which compose that sentence, may be analysed into the following words, ‘Resist —, a plot is brought home—The tour.’ And this is the anagrammatic method.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
