English Dictionary

HYPOCRITE

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IPA (US): 

 Dictionary entry overview: What does hypocrite mean? 

HYPOCRITE (noun)
  The noun HYPOCRITE has 1 sense:

1. a person who professes beliefs and opinions that he or she does not hold in order to conceal his or her real feelings or motivesplay

  Familiarity information: HYPOCRITE used as a noun is very rare.


 Dictionary entry details 


HYPOCRITE (noun)


Sense 1

Meaning:

A person who professes beliefs and opinions that he or she does not hold in order to conceal his or her real feelings or motives

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

dissembler; dissimulator; hypocrite; phoney; phony; pretender

Hypernyms ("hypocrite" is a kind of...):

beguiler; cheat; cheater; deceiver; slicker; trickster (someone who leads you to believe something that is not true)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "hypocrite"):

charmer; smoothie; smoothy; sweet talker (someone with an assured and ingratiating manner)

Tartufe; Tartuffe (a hypocrite who pretends to religious piety (after the protagonist in a play by Moliere))

whited sepulcher; whited sepulchre (a person who is inwardly evil but outwardly professes to be virtuous)


 Context examples 


I—a—I'll know nobody—and—a—say nothing—and—a—live nowhere—until I have crushed—to—a—undiscoverable atoms—the—transcendent and immortal hypocrite and perjurer—HEEP!

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

She cried bitterly over this reflection when her uncle was gone; and her cousins, on seeing her with red eyes, set her down as a hypocrite.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

"Another minute, and she will despise me for a hypocrite," thought I; and an impulse of fury against Reed, Brocklehurst, and Co. bounded in my pulses at the conviction.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

It was bad enough that a Mrs Clay should be always before her; but that a deeper hypocrite should be added to their party, seemed the destruction of everything like peace and comfort.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

He is such an incarnate hypocrite, that whatever object he pursues, he must pursue crookedly.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

He is no hypocrite now.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)



 Learn English with... Proverbs 
"Health is better than wealth." (English proverb)

"The nose didn't smell the rotting head." (Bhutanese proverb)

"Smart people are blessed." (Arabic proverb)

"A good deed is worth gold." (Dutch proverb)



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