deceit
He said that the government was guilty of deception by exaggerating the figures.
He was arrested on charges of attempted deception when he tried to use a stolen credit card.
Police uncovered a shocking story of lies, deception and blackmail.
It wasn't really magic - just some kind of clever visual deception.
Her husband was a practised liar, capable of extraordinary deception.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Lies, lying & hypocrisy
a pack of liesidiom
artifice
bad faith
black is whiteidiom
cakeism
falsification
feed someone a lineidiom
fib
fiction
flimflam
lie
mythologize
perjure
perjury
polygraph
someone can talk!idiom
stretch the truthidiom
weasel words
white lie
whopper

deception | American Dictionary

deception
noun[ C/U ]
us/dɪˈsep·ʃən/
a statement or action that hides the truth, or the act of hiding the truth:
[ U ]Most advertising involves at least some deception.

deceptive

adjectiveus/dɪˈsep·tɪv/
Appearances can be very deceptive.

deceptively

adverbus/dɪˈsep·tɪv·li/
He makes it sound deceptively simple.

deception | Business English

deception
noun[ C or U ]
uk /dɪˈsepʃən/us
dishonest or illegal methods that are used to get something, or to make people believe that something is true when it is not:
The couple were accused of obtaining money by deception.
The Insolvency Act makes stringent provision for company fraud and deception.

Examples of deception

deception
We also agree with the authors that what subjects are told about a task can be of central importance, even when deception is not involved.
Given the constant menace of enemies within and without, concealment, deception, and the ability to generate and recognize false beliefs in others would favor survival.
Interestingly, the practice of deception is attacked on external rather than internal grounds in the article.
As a result we run the risk of exhausting ourselves with issues relating to deception, suspicion, fakery and inauthenticity.
Again and again the telescope had beguiled its untrained users with mirages and deceptions.
The deceptions and rhetorical twists after 1837 produced secondary tumours with no obvious site for a primary.
Like deception, manipulation is a complex notion, heavily dependent on context.
The literal meaning of the term prestidigitator is 'nimble-fingered', but its connotations extend to the idea of illusion, imposture, deception.
The discernment and deployment of deception and indirection required in courtship prepared men for courtly existence as a whole.
These dialogues are crafted with great subtlety conveying, at the same time, convictions of truth and falsehood, choice and manipulation, decision and deception.
The target article describes some fascinating research that does not go down the well-trodden pathways of the usual studies of deception and false belief.
Here the wrongs are typically vices of concealment, involving deception and manipulation.
And this is wrong for the very same reasons that deception is wrong : it interferes with rational autonomy.
But because human representations of agency and intention include representations of false belief and deception, human society is forever under threat of moral defection.
This bit of deception, even if it was only self-deception, disturbed many of us, and we persuaded him to stop.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.