How to Use mendacious in a Sentence

mendacious

adjective
  • The newspaper story was mendacious and hurtful.
  • Goff doesn’t seem to take a ruthless or mendacious approach to the game.
    William Herkewitz, Popular Mechanics, 29 Sep. 2020
  • Among the Afghan venders, the worst of the tamale wars took place in Seattle, where the trade was dominated by a Khan with a mafioso reputation: mean, mendacious, scary as hell.
    Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, 28 Oct. 2016
  • And yet — here is Citizen Ned, self-invented, mendacious, enabled by his supporters, the rich and the not-so-rich alike.
    Laura Lippman, New York Times, 26 Apr. 2016
  • Over the years, Cruz has been called mendacious, ruthless and shamelessly self-promoting.
    Gilbert Garcia, ExpressNews.com, 29 Dec. 2020
  • Moderates helped kill reform with mendacious claims that the legislation would hurt the poor.
    The Editorial Board, WSJ, 10 Aug. 2017
  • That was bad, but his mendacious campaign against Proposition 30 is of far more consequence.
    Liza Featherstone, The New Republic, 29 Nov. 2022
  • One of the pillars of the Soviet Union was a controlled press in which all coverage was organized to confirm a mendacious ideology.
    David Satter, WSJ, 22 Dec. 2020
  • There is great value in persuading light-skinned people that race is a mendacious fiction, while white privilege is an indisputable fact.
    Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, 4 Apr. 2018
  • But those rifts are nothing compared to the enmity between the media and Trump, who has repeatedly trashed journalists as some of most dishonest and mendacious people in the country.
    John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 19 Jan. 2017
  • The challenge is reaching them before mendacious narratives do.
    Astra Taylor, The New Republic, 6 May 2021
  • Even under a president as mendacious as Nixon, the political universe was still bounded by a shared sense of reality.
    Farhad Manjoo New York Times, Star Tribune, 26 Sep. 2020
  • The result is a mendacious muddle, in which only one conclusion can be drawn: The elites are hiding something—likely something very sinister—from everyone else.
    Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 16 Sep. 2021
  • Joe Biden’s assessment of his first 100 days in office is exaggerated if not outright mendacious.
    Isaac Schorr, National Review, 30 Apr. 2021
  • Plus, everybody likes laughing at Ted Cruz, the mendacious eel who has finally departed the presidential race.
    Jack Holmes, Esquire, 5 May 2016
  • But it could be argued that consumers are dealing with many of the same issues, from devious advertising to mendacious propaganda.
    Michael J. Socolow, Smithsonian, 11 May 2018
  • Letters written while events were unfolding appear side by side with memoirs, some thoughtful and others mendacious, written decades later.
    Gary Saul Morson, The New York Review of Books, 15 June 2021
  • The C.D.C. produced, in 2004, a mendacious paper concluding that water-lead levels in the city were lower and less concerning than had been reported, and that no children with dangerously high blood-lead levels had been found.
    Sarah Larson, The New Yorker, 4 Feb. 2016
  • War is worshipped and justified by the state’s mendacious propaganda machine.
    Alexander Motyl, The Conversation, 30 Mar. 2022
  • Close to 90 percent of Republicans believe the most patently mendacious president in history over the flawed, but still generally earnest, CNN.
    Andrew Sullivan, Daily Intelligencer, 7 July 2017
  • Okay, hardly anyone, living or dead, objects any more to the rote recitation of what is actually quite mendacious historical twaddle.
    Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 3 Mar. 2012
  • Mildred had become great friends with her and had given her an elaborate but mendacious account of the circumstances which had brought her to the pass she was in.
    W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, 1915
  • Dogged and ingenious interrogation of a mendacious suspect finally gets at the truth.
    The Economist, 7 Dec. 2019
  • And either scenario will bring out both the absolute best and worst in human nature: Hero first responders, innovators and leaders as well as mendacious grifters, conspiracy theorists and tyrants.
    Bill Weir, CNN, 25 Apr. 2020
  • Birx was accused of enabling an incompetent and mendacious President.
    Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, 28 Dec. 2020
  • All this relies on the invention of mendacious attributes, conferring on millions of diverse people implausible character flaws or virtues.
    BostonGlobe.com, 12 Oct. 2019
  • The Balfour Declaration plays a crucial role in their mendacious narrative depicting Zionism as a form of imperialism.
    Daniel Johnson, WSJ, 31 Oct. 2016
  • When Hanif’s English-language reporting has exposed corrupt or mendacious leaders, the official reaction has often been benign.
    Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker, 9 May 2016
  • In its mendacious rendering of the past, Putin’s historical screed tapped deep currents of imperialist nostalgia and the enduring belief that the lands to Russia’s west were its historical patrimony.
    Daniel Beer, Washington Post, 29 Sep. 2022
  • Another Story of the World In this appealing satire from Uruguay, a history teacher challenges the authority of his small town's mendacious and despotic military governor by teaching alternative facts.
    Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 5 Apr. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'mendacious.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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