Definition of "manœuvre"

She delighted in schemes and in projects; she governed her husband by a series of manœuvres, whose only fault was their being entirely wasted; as a simple wish, openly expressed, would have answered every purpose.

1838 (date written), L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter III, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], published 1842, page 25

[…] but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manœuvres; and one had but to accept it — to answer what he asked […]

1850, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Gregson and Lestrade had watched the manœuvres of their amateur companion with considerable curiosity and some contempt.

1886, Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Peter, forging ahead with the bag, stopped to see the result of these manœuvres.

1930, Norman Lindsay, Redheap, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1965, page 131

[…] we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of brutal and treacherous manœuvre.

1940, Winston Churchill, We shall fight on the beaches

All early accounts agree that one of Stalin’s characteristics was ‘laziness’ or ‘indolence’ - which Bukharin impressed on Trotsky as Stalin’s ‘most striking quality’. Trotsky remarked that Stalin ‘never did any serious work’ but was always ‘busy with his intrigues’. Another way of putting this is that Stalin paid the necessary attention to the detail of political manœuvre.

1968, Robert Conquest, “The Purge Begins”, in The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties‎, Macmillan Company, pages 74–75

[…] and the belief that states had increasingly little room for manœuvre if they wanted their people to benefit from it.

2003, David Miller, Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, page 7

We can ask how long it was before the team scored its first goal; or how long the centre-forward spent in manœuvring the ball towards the goal; and even how long the ball was in flight between his kicking it and its going between the goal-posts. But we cannot ask how many seconds were occupied in the scoring of the goal.

1954, Gilbert Ryle, “dilemma vii: Perception”, in Dilemmas: The Tarner Lectures, 1953, The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, page 103

Mr.Marples has thus manœuvred himself into a corner.

1963 June, “Second thoughts on Beeching”, in Modern Railways, page 362