Tergiversation
noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 The act of abandoning something or someone, of changing sides; desertion; betrayal. countable, uncountable
"They make their outward impudence their mask, as foxes, the better we may not see where they truly tend, nor their true black tergiversation beneath."
- 2 the act of abandoning a party for cause wordnet
- 3 The act of evading any clear course of action or speech, of being deliberately ambiguous; equivocation; fickleness. countable, uncountable
"Anyone who desires an hour's amusement may be advised to look up the tergiversations of eminent craniologists in their attempts to prove from brain measurements that women are stupider than men."
- 4 falsification by means of vague or ambiguous language wordnet
Example
More examples"They make their outward impudence their mask, as foxes, the better we may not see where they truly tend, nor their true black tergiversation beneath."
Etymology
From Latin tergiversātiō, from tergiversārī (“to turn one's back, to evade, to avoid”) + -tiō (“-tion: forming abstract nouns”). Equivalent to tergiversate + -ion.
More for "tergiversation"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.