These words pertain to the use of misrepresentation to win the trust or approval of others. Deception has the widest range of uses; at its mildest, the word can suggest a necessary or inconsequential misrepresentation: She referred to the pills as sweets, a harmless deception that made it easier to administer them to the child. At its most disapproving the word can point to selfish dishonesty: a candidate who prectised all kinds of deception on the voters to win their confidence. Deceit , which is wholly negative in tone, is considerably harsher than deception in its disapproval. It can suggest a habitual liar or schemer or refer to an involved plan to take advantage of someone else: the flagrant deceit by which he kept his wife from knowing about the affair. Where deceit often stresses the dishonesty of one person to another, fraud more often points to a complex, more impersonal system for cheating all comers or the public at large. It often suggests official dishonesty or financial malfeasance: a land-development fraud that bankrupted a dozen elderly couples. Sometimes the word is used hyperbolically for anything one finds utterly worthless: That play was a total fraud .

Equivocation is most closely related to the mildest sense of deception , but can be even less severe, since it need indicate no intent to deceive. Instead, it points to an evasive or pussyfooting approach: Her equivocations sometimes seemed to be nothing more than a reluctance to give him a straight yes or no answer. In some case, the word is used as a mere euphemism for a lie: He denied having lied to her, although he admitted that he had been guilty of an equivocation or two. Trickery points less to verbal misrepresentation alone than to the deliberate giving of false appearances. It is milder in its disapproval than deceit and fraud , although it can apply to either personal or public behaviour. Trickery is a harsher term than deception, however, in suggesting the selfish seeking of gain, often by means of a systematic scheme: the trickery they practised on their fair-weather friends in order seem richer and more famous than they were; He had gained control of the company by trickery in manipulating the proxy votes entrusted to him. While chicanery suggests less serious offences than do trickery or fraud , the word adds a note of disgust for shoddy methods: Press agents for film stars will stoop to any kind of chicanery to get their clients publicity.