liar
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of liar
before 950; Middle English lier, Old English lēogere. See lie 1, -ar 1
Explanation
A liar is someone who doesn't tell the truth. A liar tells lies. "Liar, liar, pants on fire," a phrase of unknown origin, is a children's jump-rope rhyme also used as a playground taunt. Adults, and especially political commentators, have also been known to use the phrase or part of it as a particularly demeaning insult aimed at politicians who make outrageous claims that can't possibly be true. Notice that liar ends in -ar, not -er, as you might expect.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
An unearthed memo from Sutskever described Altman as a liar who pitted executives against one another.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 19, 2026
Altman remained calm under the barrage, even as Molo pressed him on the testimony of other witnesses who had described him as a liar.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 16, 2026
Zoning in on his career and moments such as his dramatic ousting from OpenAI in 2023, the story portrayed Altman as a pathological liar.
From BBC ● May 15, 2026
“Steve is a fraud. He’s a liar, and I’m not going to sit by and just let him do it anymore,” Bianco said after the Rancho Mirage debate.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 10, 2026
The one that revealed that he was absolutely, definitely, a liar.
From "Boy 2.0" by Tracey Baptiste
I do think she’s calling the supermajority liars.
From Slate ● Jun. 3, 2026
Ms. Adelman describes how Lewis’s specimens fell into the hands of a series of botanists—some of them charlatans, drunkards, liars or thieves—who squandered his legacy.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 16, 2026
Navy attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug-smuggling boat, and almost certain liars for their accounts of the incident.
From Salon ● Dec. 20, 2025
So do actors and performers like those on this show make better liars than previous contestants?
From BBC ● Oct. 10, 2025
“This isn’t Candor. There are liars here, Caleb. There are people who are so smart they know how to manipulate you.”
From "Divergent" by Veronica Roth
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
