Prevarication1. (n.) The act of prevaricating, shuffling, or quibbling, to evade the truth or the disclosure of truth; a deviation from the truth and fair dealing.
2. (n.) A secret abuse in the exercise of a public office.
3. (n.) The collusion of an informer with the defendant, for the purpose of making a sham prosecution.
4. (n.) A false or deceitful seeming to undertake a thing for the purpose of defeating or destroying it.
Thesaurus Entries
bickering, blague, boggling, bouncer, canard, captiousness, caviling, chicane, chicanery, cock-and-bull story, coloring, confabulation, distortion, dodging, equivocation, evasion, exaggeration, fairy tale, false coloring, false swearing, falsehood, falsification, falsifying, falsity, farfetched story, farrago, fencing, fib, fiction, fish story, flam, flimflam, ghost story, hairsplitting, half-truth, hedging, legal fiction, lie, little white lie, logic-chopping, mendacity, miscoloring, misconstruction, misrepresentation, misstatement, nit-picking, paltering, parrying, perjury, perversion, pettifoggery, pious fiction, pussyfooting, quibbling, shifting, shuffle, shuffling, sidestepping, slight stretching, story, straining, subterfuge, suppressio veri, tale, tall story, tall tale, taradiddle, tergiversation, trichoschistism, trumped-up story, untruth, weasel words, white lie, yarn