hint

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A slight indication or intimation.
• noun A brief or indirect suggestion; a tip.
• noun A statement conveying information in an indirect fashion; a clue.
• noun A barely perceptible amount.
• noun Archaic An occasion; an opportunity.
• intransitive verb To express or state indirectly: synonym: suggest.
• intransitive verb To indicate or make evident in an indirect manner.
• intransitive verb To give a hint.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To lay hold of; seize; snatch: a dialectal variant of hent.
• To suggest in an indirect manner; indicate by allusion or implication; give a hint of.
• Synonyms 2. Hint, Intimate, Suggest, Insinuate. To hint is to convey an idea in the lightest possible manner, and especially by implication; to let one's thought be known in an indirect, hesitating, or partial manner. To intimate is to convey one's meaning more plainly than by a hint, but still not directly or explicitly. Suggest has a somewhat wide range, often meaning essentially the same as propose or remind (one) of, and ranging down to the meaning of hint: as, to suggest a plan; to suggest more than one says. Insinuate is now generally used in a bad sense; when used in a good sense, it implies pains taken and delicacy of skill. Hints and insinuations are always covert, intimations often, suggestions rarely. An innuendo is a peculiarly dark, crafty, or mean insinuation.
• To make an indirect reference, suggestion, or allusion.
• Synonyms Allude (to), Refer (to), etc. See advert, v. i.
• noun An act of exertion; a snatch: as, in a hint, in a moment.
• noun An opportunity; a fit time.
• noun A suggestion made indirectly; a covert suggestion or implication; an indirect indication, conveyed by speech, gesture, action, or circumstance, whether intentional or unintentional.
• noun Synonyms See hint, v. t.
• Behind.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• transitive verb To bring to mind by a slight mention or remote allusion; to suggest in an indirect manner.
• noun A remote allusion; slight mention; intimation; insinuation; a suggestion or reminder, without a full declaration or explanation; also, an occasion or motive.
• intransitive verb To make an indirect reference, suggestion, or allusion; to allude vaguely to something.
• intransitive verb to allude to lightly, indirectly, or cautiously.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A clue.
• noun A tacit suggestion that avoids a direct statement.
• noun A small, barely detectable amount of.
• noun Information in a computer-based font that suggests how the outlines of the font's glyphs should be distorted in order to produce, at specific sizes, a visually appealing pixel-based rendering. Also known as hinting.
• noun obsolete An opportunity; occasion; fit time.
• verb To suggest tacitly without a direct statement; to provide a clue.
• verb To develop and add hints to a font.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a slight indication
• noun a slight but appreciable amount
• noun a just detectable amount
• noun an indication of potential opportunity
• verb drop a hint; intimate by a hint
• noun an indirect suggestion