These words refer to statements or formulations that are misleading or contrary to fact. Lie is the most general of these, but it is exclusively restricted to a conscious and deliberate intention to distort the truth.

• She told a lie about how much the new dress had cost her; It was a lie that no arms shipments were being sent to the front.

In heated debate, the word is often applied more loosely to inadvertent misstatements or statements thought to be hypocritical: It’s simply a lie that may opponent could carry out all these campaign promises without increasing taxes. Sometimes, the word can apply to masking an unpleasant situation with a pleasant exterior: She was unwilling to live a lie for the sake of her husband’s political future. In the idiom give the lie to, a conclusive disproof of an assertion or theory is indicated: evidence that gave the lie to their claim of having remained strictly neutral during the crisis.

By contrast, rationalization is very specific, indicating a thought process by which one attempts to justify one’s actions, either to oneself or to others, by consciously or unconsciously distorting the truth. Although psychologists may view all formulated explanations as rationalizations , the word has become a fad word for ingenious but specious reasoning that puts one’s own behaviour in the most favourable light possible: The psychiatrist works to get behind the web of rationalizations to the real conflicts and anxieties they conceal; his rationalization that being late for work was a forgivable foible, considering how indispensable he was to the office; Nazis whose rationalization was that they were only obeying orders.

The remaining words can all be used as euphemisms for lie. Fib , the most informal of these words, is exclusively used in this way, suggesting a trivial, harmless or forgivable lie : She turned him down with a fib about already having an engagement for the evening. The word may now sound a bit dated. Prevarication , the most formal word here, would be taken by many as an extremely offensive and over-fancy euphemism for lie ; as such, it might be useful as humour or irony: comforted that the commandment prohibiting lies said nothing about prevarication . The word can have a special area of meaning that refers not to bald misstatements of fact but to the deceptive statement of half-truths – a distinction that would be lost on many people.

Falsehood and untruth , as euphemisms, are less formal circumlocutions than prevarication . Falsehood , however, has a legitimate reference to any incorrectness, whether intentional or not: The falsehood of this prevalent notion is now inescapable. Untruth can sometimes refer to fictions that were never intended to mislead or be taken as fact: Novelists devise untruths that sometimes have a greater validity than the statistical truths of the social sciences.