deceptive or deceitful? See note at deceitful. In phrases like a deceptively spacious house, which are characteristic of marketing and advertising jargon, deceptively is used in a seemingly odd way. In this phrase, the house is spacious only in the sense that appearances suggest otherwise; deceptively here is equivalent to surprisingly rather than misleadingly (which deceptively means in a phrase such as her voice was deceptively calm: it was indeed calm in a way that the house is not spacious). Logically we might expect the wording to be a deceptively cramped house; but for obvious reasons this is not usually found