- Today's Word
Mendacious
men-DAY-shus
Definition
(adjective) Given to lying; habitually untruthful in a way that is deliberate rather than accidental.
Example
The mendacious account he’d given the board held together just long enough for him to resign before anyone checked the numbers.
Word Origin
Mendacious derives from the Latin mendax, meaning “lying” or “false,” from mendum — “fault” or “defect.” The same root gives us mendacity — the noun form — and is related to emend and amend, both words about correcting faults. It entered English in the 17th century, used to describe not a single lie but a habitual disposition toward untruth — the difference between someone who lies and someone who is a liar.
Fun Fact
The psychology of habitual lying has fascinated researchers for decades, and the findings are consistently counterintuitive. Studies show that skilled liars don’t exhibit the nervous behaviors most people associate with deception — increased blinking, gaze aversion, fidgeting — because those behaviors are products of anxiety, and practiced liars simply aren’t anxious about lying. Research by psychologist Bella DePaulo found that people lie in approximately one fifth of their social interactions, most of them minor. The mendacious outlier isn’t someone who lies more often — it’s someone for whom the distinction between truth and falsehood has simply stopped being meaningful.