dishonest

dishonest, deceitful, mendacious, lying, untruthful are comparable especially when applying to persons, their utterances, and their acts and meaning deficient in honesty and unworthy of trust or belief. Dishonest may apply to any breach of honesty or trust (as by lying, deceiving, stealing, cheating, or defrauding)

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a dishonest statement

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a dishonest employee

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while it would be dishonest to gloss over this weakness, one must understand it in terms of the circumstances that conspired to produce it—Mum ford

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years ago a few dishonest men traveled about the country, saying that they could make rain— Craig & Urban

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Deceitful usually implies the intent to mislead or to impose upon another in order to obscure one's real nature or actual purpose or intention, or the true character of something offered, given, or sold; it therefore usually suggests a' false or specious appearance, indulgence in falsehoods, cheating, defrauding, or double-dealing

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deceitful propaganda

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deceitful testimony

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she was a deceitful, scheming little thing— Zangwill

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Mendacious is typically more formal than, often less derogatory than, but otherwise closely equivalent to lying, the ordinary, direct, unequivocal word

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silly newspapers and magazines for the circulation of lying advertisements— Shaw

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a lying account of the accident

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go aboard the ships that caught his interest where the masters ... set out wine and told him mendacious tales of their trade— Wheelwright

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while the communication was deceptive and so intended, it was not technically mendacious— S. H. Adams

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As applied to persons mendacious more often suggests the habitude of deceit while lying suggests guilt in respect to a particular instance; thus, one might describe a persorf as mendacious with primary reference to his character or habit but would ordinarily prefer lying when a particular instance is in view

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a mendacious child is doubted even when telling the truth

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only a lying scoundrel would tell such a tale

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Untruthful is often used in place of mendacious or lying as a slightly less brutal word; however, the term distinctively implies lack of correspondence between what is said or represented and the facts of the case or the reality, and is often applied to statements, accounts, reports, or descriptions with little stress on dis-honesty or intent to deceive

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an untruthful account of an incident

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the artist's representation of the scene at Versailles was untruthful in many of its details

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Analogous words: *crooked, devious, oblique: false, *faithless, perfidious: cheating, cozening, defrauding, swindling (see CHEAT vb)

Antonyms: honest

Contrasted words: *upright, honorable, scrupulous, conscientious, just: *straightforward, forthright, above-board: candid, open, *frank, plain