How to Use perfidious in a Sentence

perfidious

adjective
  • We were betrayed by a perfidious ally.
  • It's been Agatha all along — and her very own insidious, perfidious spinoff is now in the works.
    Brendan Morrow, The Week, 7 Oct. 2021
  • Boys who sing songs about perfidious ex-girlfriends risk sounding like jerks, or worse.
    Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, 31 May 2021
  • Elena—most perfidious of all—turns her best friend’s life into a best-selling novel.
    Elaine Blair, The New York Review of Books, 24 Sep. 2020
  • The country needed a leader and much of the public and news media found it in the gruff, uncharismatic, and perfidious form of Andrew Cuomo.
    Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 3 Aug. 2021
  • This latest version, originating in the Kremlin, is just a new, perfidious variant of the old virus called anti-Semitism.
    Michael Brenner, Smithsonian Magazine, 29 June 2022
  • The new heroes are black and white women determined to clean up the mess created by Fowler and his perfidious white financial backer.
    Tony Adler, Chicago Reader, 11 May 2018
  • The real mystery in this perfidious tale is why the FBI decided to advance the dossier hoax to the world, thus weakening America and its presidency.
    WSJ, 6 June 2022
  • Countries also find ways to live with them, and they can be used as a rhetorical device—unfair sanctions imposed by a perfidious West—to tighten a ruler’s grip on power.
    Tom McTague, The Atlantic, 23 Feb. 2022
  • Some have warned of a perfidious plot to revive the British empire with help from Muslims, particularly Shias, who revere the Prophet’s descendants.
    The Economist, 5 Apr. 2018
  • That perfidious history is not the sole reason Fair Park First and its outside park-makers and master-planners chose this location.
    Robert Wilonsky, Dallas News, 25 Feb. 2020
  • What chance has an export health certificate against the Royal Navy sending the perfidious French invaders scurrying back to Europe?
    Fintan O’Toole, The New York Review of Books, 13 May 2021
  • Thanks to that episode, and to Winston Churchill’s denunciation of the agreement, the names of Munich, Chamberlain, and appeasement have ever since been bywords for perfidious betrayal.
    Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The New Republic, 21 Feb. 2022
  • The problem isn’t that Obama and Clinton and Trump and whoever else are all perfidious backstabbers who have betrayed the anti-intervention movement.
    Noah Berlatsky, Slate Magazine, 24 Apr. 2017
  • Few would dispute the need to confront China on its perfidious treatment of its Uighur minority, not to mention various other human rights abuses in the country.
    Ike Brannon, Forbes, 2 Sep. 2021
  • The British, who ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, were particularly perfidious.
    Washington Post, 30 Oct. 2020
  • Even Macron, for all his warnings about perfidious Albion, must realize that Europe’s high-pressure Brexit strategy hasn’t worked any wonders.
    Washington Post, 24 Sep. 2019
  • According to Barnum’s version of events, he was ruined by a perfidious business partner, who tricked him into endorsing half a million dollars’ worth of promissory notes.
    Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 29 July 2019
  • But what’s truly unprecedented about this bill is the range of organizations that its supporters hope to cleanse of perfidious foreign influence.
    Casey Michel, The New Republic, 27 June 2022
  • In one of human history’s cruelest ironies and most perfidious paradoxes, Xi Jinping now bestrides the world as a Marxist robber-baron, a creature whose existence has eluded our categories of political thought for the last 200 years.
    Cameron Hilditch, National Review, 21 Feb. 2021
  • Giuliani claimed that Trump’s legal team had gathered hundreds of affidavits from poll watchers and election officials alleging perfidious acts.
    John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 20 Nov. 2020
  • Our country surely could not countenance the injuring of more than 130 police officers (including one who subsequently died) and the perfidious calls to lynch the Republican vice president and the Democratic speaker of the House.
    Phillip Halpern, San Diego Union-Tribune, 16 Dec. 2021
  • Even by that relatively late date, when the authoritarian nature of the regime was already clear, Jacobin was defending it against its perfidious neoliberal critics.
    Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, 28 June 2017
  • Some readers will find his rhetoric perfidious and reactionary, with its dismissal of identity politics and the concomitant particulars of the African-American experience.
    Andrew Solomon, New York Times, 18 Oct. 2019
  • But Gabbard has virtually no traction as a presidential candidate, owing to her own flakiness, illiberal record, and coziness with Syria’s perfidious, genocidal dictator, Bashar al-Assad.
    Adam Weinstein, The New Republic, 12 July 2019
  • Their allegiance was met by this unholy alliance of perfidious greed devolving rapidly into the audacity of vituperative unparalleled predatory rapacity.
    Fortune, 31 Aug. 2017
  • Unsurprisingly, many ordinary Americans came to see themselves as victims of perfidious conspiracies, channeling their energies into indignant rebellions like the Anti-Masonic Party.
    Kevin Baker, New Republic, 13 June 2017
  • Facebook and Twitter periodically purge perfidious propaganda-bots.
    Fortune Staff, Fortune, 2 Dec. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'perfidious.' 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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