Verb

(rare) To creep, wind, or flow into; to enter gently, slowly, or imperceptibly, as into crevices.

* Woodward

The water easily insinuates itself into, and placidly distends, the vessels of vegetables.

(figurative, by extension) To ingratiate; to obtain access to or introduce something by subtle, cunning or artful means.

* 1995 , , p. 242

Nanny didn't so much enter places as insinuate herself; she had unconsciously taken a natural talent for liking people and developed it into an occult science.

* John Locke

All the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.

* Dryden

Horace laughs to shame all follies and insinuates virtue, rather by familiar examples than by the severity of precepts.

* Clarendon

He insinuated himself into the very good grace of the Duke of Buckingham.

To hint; to suggest tacitly while avoiding a direct statement.

She insinuated that her friends had betrayed her.

Verb

(allud)

To refer to something indirectly or by suggestion.

* 1597 , , Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity , Book V, Chapter xxix.3, 1841 ed., page 523:

These speeches . . . do seem to allude unto such ministerial garments as were then in use.

* 1846 , George Luxford, Edward Newman, The Phytologist: a popular botanical miscellany: Volume 2, Part 2 , page 474

It was aptly said by Newton that "whatever is not deduced from facts must be regarded as hypothesis," but hypothesis appears to us a title too honourable for the crude guessings to which we allude .

* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-01

, author=Robert L. Dorit , title=Rereading Darwin , volume=100, issue=1, page=23 , magazine= citation , passage=We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.}}