HYPOCRITICAL

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does hypocritical mean? 

• HYPOCRITICAL (adjective)
  The adjective HYPOCRITICAL has 1 sense:

1. professing feelings or virtues one does not have

  Familiarity information: HYPOCRITICAL used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• HYPOCRITICAL (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Professing feelings or virtues one does not have

Context example:

hypocritical praise

Similar:

insincere (lacking sincerity)

Derivation:

hypocrisy (insincerity by virtue of pretending to have qualities or beliefs that you do not really have)

hypocrisy (an expression of agreement that is not supported by real conviction)

 Context examples 

I am afraid it was hypocritical in me, but seeing that my aunt felt strongly on the subject, I tried to look as if I felt strongly too.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion of her.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

Hypocritical fiend!

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

No, that I am sure I shall not; and I think it is very impertinent of him to write to you at all, and very hypocritical.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

A word of encouragement and explanation, of pity for my childish ignorance, of welcome home, of reassurance to me that it was home, might have made me dutiful to him in my heart henceforth, instead of in my hypocritical outside, and might have made me respect instead of hate him.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

It would have been in vain to represent to such a man as the Worshipful Mr. Creakle, that Twenty Seven and Twenty Eight were perfectly consistent and unchanged; that exactly what they were then, they had always been; that the hypocritical knaves were just the subjects to make that sort of profession in such a place; that they knew its market-value at least as well as we did, in the immediate service it would do them when they were expatriated; in a word, that it was a rotten, hollow, painfully suggestive piece of business altogether.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)