wary
After our initial wariness wears off, we find him entertaining, straightforward, and honest.
Industry experts expressed wariness of the report and its implications.
She saw pain as well as confusion and a certain hard wariness in his eyes.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Paying attention and being careful
attention span
attentiveness
baby
be good, and if you can't be good, be carefulidiom
be on (your) guardidiom
egg
flow
follow/steer/take the middle course/way/pathidiom
get religionidiom
guard
hang
hang on/upon something
prudently
religion
revolve
revolve around someone/something
safety
safety firstidiom
sit
the/a glare of somethingidiom

Examples of wariness

wariness
Subscribers do not necessarily share that wariness: their numbers have been rising steadily for the past two seasons.
One example would be the child who displayed immediate sociable behavior toward the experimenter but then showed strong wariness of her.
There were high levels of scepticism and wariness about formal health and social services, and this was coupled with anxiety about their intrusiveness.
The confidence of the eighteenth century was giving way to wariness in the nineteenth century.
In one study, relatively high levels of cortisol at age 4.5 years predicted internalizing problems and social wariness more strongly in girls than boys.
Such responses might reasonably include wariness of unfamiliar persons and the tolerance of relative isolation that characterizes schizotypy.
Thus, some children at risk for victimization may approach "risky" peer situations without the appropriate degree of wariness.
On the basis of temperament, some normal babies may have a very mellow version of wariness.
Perhaps because of a resulting wariness of categorizing, few explorations into the ontological status of traits or disorders as dimensional versus discrete have been conducted.
The other is increasing wariness with respect to funded saving, whose higher expected rate of return is accompanied by higher variability.
We have argued that this wariness is justified in so far as residential settings still represent a threat not to individuality but, much more profoundly, to the sense of self.
A relatively chronic state of fear and wariness may be highly detrimental to the early social interaction and social learning proclivities of infants classified as disorganized.
Perhaps this lack of taxometrics research within developmental psychopathology reflects the aforementioned preference for continuous models of behavioral functioning and an associated wariness of categorical diagnostic systems.
Perceptions of heightened risk, par ticularly if accompanied by heightened irritability or wariness, may strengthen the emotional connection between the marital and the parent- child subsystem.
The critical output of this decade amounted to many circulated tracts of self-reflection, inter-individual arguments, and a general wariness of cultural movements being championed in other areas of the left.
See all examples of wariness
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.