falsehood

I

(New American Roget's College Thesaurus)

Lack of honesty

Nouns

1. falsehood, falseness, dishonesty; falsity, falsification; deception, untruth; lying, misrepresentation, disinformation, plausible denial; mendacity, perjury, forgery, invention, fabrication; paradox of the liar. Slang, cooking.

2. perversion or suppression of truth, fiction, romance; perversion, distortion, false coloring; exaggeration, prevarication, equivocation, mystification (see concealment); simulation, imitation, dissimulation, dissembling; whitewash; sham, make-believe, pretense, pretending, malingering. Informal, playacting, bunk. Slang, flaking.

3. (treachery) lip service; hollowness; duplicity, double-dealing, insincerity, hypocrisy, facade, cant, humbug, sanctimony; pharisaism; Machiavellianism; crocodile tears, mealymouthedness, quackery; charlatanism, charlatanry; cajolery, flattery; Judas kiss; perfidy, bad faith, unfairness (see improbity); misstatement (see error). Informal, front. Slang, four-flushing.

4. lie, half-truth, white lie, yarn, tall story, fable, fiction, fabrication, pious fraud, song and dance, cock-and-bull story; irony. Informal, lollapalooza, whopper, fairy tale, weasel words, hogwash, poppycock. Slang, bunk[um], crock [of shit], crap[ola], bullshit.

5. fake, phony, counterfeit, forgery; paste, dummy, shoddy; hoax, fraud; impostor. Informal, rip-off, put-on.

6. liar, fibber, fabulist, prevaricator, falsifier, perjurer; charlatan; Ananias, Baron Munchhausen. Slang, baby kisser, buller, fourflusher.

7. liars' club. Slang, bull session.

Verbs

1. be false, speak falsely, tell a lie, lie, fib, misspeak; lie like a trooper, lie in one's throat, forswear, perjure oneself, bear false witness; belie, falsify, pervert, distort, misquote; put a false construction upon, misinterpret; misinform, mislead; prevaricate, equivocate, quibble; fence, mince the truth, beat about the bush, blow hot and cold, play fast and loose; garble, gloss over, disguise, color, varnish, dress up, embroider; pad the bill; exaggerate. Slang, throw the bull; cook.

2. invent, fabricate; trump up, get up; forge, hatch, concoct; romance, imagine (see imagination); cry "wolf! "; dissemble, dissimulate, palter; feign, assume, put on, pretend, make believe (see affectation); play false, play a double game; pull out of a hat; act or play a part; affect, simulate; palm off, pass off for; counterfeit, sham, make a show of, malinger; cant, fob off, put on, play the hypocrite, sail under false colors, deceive (see deception); go through the motions. Informal, let on, playact, play possum, put on a front. Slang, fourflush.

Adjectives

1. false, deceitful, mendacious, untruthful, unveracious, fraudulent, dishonest, make-believe, faithless, truthless, trothless; unfair, uncandid, evasive; uningenuous, disingenuous; hollow, insincere, forsworn; canting; hypocritical, pharisaical, sanctimonious; Machiavellian, two-faced, double-dealing; Janus-faced; smooth-faced, -spoken, or -tongued, tongue-in-cheek; mealy-mouthed; less than candid; affected; collusive, collusory, perfidious (see improbity). Slang, full of shit.

2. spurious, deceptive (see deception); untrue, falsified; ungrounded, unfounded; counterfeit, phony, fake, mock, synthetic; inoperative.

Adverbs — falsely; slyly, crookedly, etc.

Phrases — half the truth is often a whole lie; a lie can go around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots; ask no questions and hear no lies.

Quotations — I want that glib and oily art to speak and purpose not (Shakespeare), The lie in the soul is a true lie (Benjamin Jowett), A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation (Saki), Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom (Anatole France), A truth that's told with false intent beats all the lies you can invent (William Blake), Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him (Charles de Gaulle), White lies always introduce others of a darker complexion (William Paley), O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive! (Sir Walter Scott), I detest that man who hides one thing in the depth of his heart and speaks forth another (Homer), Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core (Hannah Arendt).

Antonyms, see truth, reasoning.

II

(Roget's IV) n.

Syn. prevarication, misrepresentation, story, untruth; see lie 1 .

III

(Roget's 3 Superthesaurus) n.

lie, untruth, fib, fiction, fabrication, distortion, *whopper, prevarication, canard, *tall tale, perjury, fraud, *hogwash.

ANT.: truth, fact, reality

IV

(Roget's Thesaurus II) noun 1. An untrue declaration: canard, cock-and-bull story, falsity, fib, fiction, inveracity, lie2, misrepresentation, misstatement, prevarication, story, tale, untruth. Informal: fish story, tall tale. Slang: whopper. See TRUE. 2. An erroneous or false idea: erroneousness, error, fallacy, falseness, falsity, untruth. See CORRECT, TRUE. 3. The practice of lying: inveracity, mendacity, perjury, truthlessness, untruthfulness. See TRUE.