Log in or Sign up
  1. prevaricate love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. v. To stray from or evade the truth; equivocate. See Synonyms at lie2.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. To deviate; swerve from the normal or proper course; stray.
  2. To swerve from the truth; act or speak evasively; quibble.
  3. In law: To undertake a thing falsely and deceitfully, with the purpose of defeating or destroying the object which it is professed to promote.
  4. To betray the cause of a client, and by collusion assist his opponent.
  5. To pervert; cause to deviate from the normal or proper path, application, or meaning.
  6. To transgress; violate.

Wiktionary

  1. v. transitive, intransitive, obsolete To deviate, transgress; to go astray (from).
  2. v. intransitive To shift or turn from direct speech or behaviour; to evade the truth; to waffle or be (intentionally) ambiguous.
  3. v. intransitive, law To collude, as where an informer colludes with the defendant, and makes a sham prosecution.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. v. To shift or turn from one side to the other, from the direct course, or from truth; to speak with equivocation; to shuffle; to quibble.
  2. v. (Civil Law) To collude, as where an informer colludes with the defendant, and makes a sham prosecution.
  3. v. (Eng. Law) To undertake a thing falsely and deceitfully, with the purpose of defeating or destroying it.
  4. v. obsolete To evade by a quibble; to transgress; to pervert.

WordNet 3.0

  1. v. be deliberately ambiguous or unclear in order to mislead or withhold information

Etymologies

  1. From the participle stem of Latin praevāricārī, from prae- with vāricāre, from vārus, from Proto-Indo-European *wā- (“to bend apart”) (the root of ‘various’). (Wiktionary)
  2. Latin praevāricārī, praevāricāt- : prae-, pre- + vāricāre, to straddle (from vāricus, straddling, from vārus, bent). (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

Show 10 more examples...

Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘prevaricate’.

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • kingparton Why should we prevaricate, just at the last? We never prevaricated before. I have got to die some time, and it's better to die when one is sick than when one is well.

    Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady Nov 12, 2011

  • Prolagus "Now, then, sir, don't prevaricate," he began - "don't prevaricate!"
    "I won't, sir," answered his son, mildly.
    "You will. With all my experience, I surely ought to know when a man is going to prevaricate or not," said his sire. "Now, sir, I am going to ask you a plain question, and I want a plain answer. I am a plain man, as you know."


    (Frank Leslie's Pleasant Hours (1879), by Frank Leslie) Aug 4, 2008

Tweets

Looking for tweets for prevaricate.

‘prevaricate’ has been looked up 5978 times, loved by 28 people, added to 178 lists, commented on 2 times, and has a Scrabble score of 18.