Liar

How to spell liar

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce liar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does liar mean?

1. nounA person who tells lies, especially habitually.

Liar in a sentence

• The witness was exposed as a liar during cross-examination.

• Once the figures were checked, everyone knew the salesman was a liar.

Where does liar come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Liar descends from Old English 'leogere', meaning a person who lies, which was built directly on the verb 'leogan', 'to tell an untruth'. That verb has solid Germanic roots and is related to similar words across the family, including the modern German 'lugen', 'to lie'. The noun has named the deceitful speaker continuously for well over a thousand years, making it one of the older insults in English. The spelling trap lives in the ending: although the word is built from 'lie', the agent suffix here is the less common '-ar' rather than the familiar '-er' seen in 'speaker' or 'writer', and writers often default to 'lier'. Keeping the link to 'lie' in mind explains the 'i', while remembering that this particular agent noun takes '-ar' guards against the wrong ending.

How the word is built

• lie (to tell an untruth)
• -ar (agent suffix: one who does)