Ingenious is cleverness you admire. Crafty is cleverness used to trick someone.
Both words mean clever, and children often reach for crafty because it sounds friendlier. But the two words take opposite sides.
Ingenious is praise for a brilliant idea. A girl who builds a bird feeder from a plastic bottle and two wooden spoons has come up with something ingenious. Nobody has been fooled; she has simply been inventive.
Crafty is cleverness with a sneaky edge. The crafty fox in the story waits for the farmer to turn his back, and a crafty brother who swaps the small slice of cake for the big one while you are looking away is being crafty too. There is usually someone on the losing end of a crafty plan.
Clever at getting what you want, often by tricking people.
Similar: sly, sneaky, clever
Very clever and full of smart ideas.
Similar: clever, inventive, brilliant
Questions asking how the writer wants you to feel about a character depend on words like these. If a character is called crafty, the writer is warning you not to trust them; reading it as a plain word for clever misses the point.
Definitions and example sentences on this page are the ones a child sees inside Wordrealm, taken from our list of over 1,100 words. It is free to browse, with nothing to sign up for.
Plain-English guides to each test, from the councils’ own pages: Kent Test · Medway Test · Bucks Secondary Transfer Test