Word.ws English Dictionary

apocryphiar

apocryphiar noun: one who rewrites history to their own advantage or tells self-aggrandizing falsehoods.

Noun

apocryphiar (plural apocryphiars)

  1. One who rewrites history to their own advantage or tells self-aggrandizing falsehoods.
    • Martha Gellhorn made a long list of such incidents, concluding that as an "apocryphiar. . . Miss Hellman ranks sublime."1996, Leo Katz, Ill-Gotten Gains, →ISBN
    • Became a shameful embarrassing apocryphiar about himself, which I believe damaged him as a man, but he was not like that in Spain nor in China . . . never in my hearing.2001, Andrea Lynn, Shadow Lovers: The Last Affairs of H.G. Wells, page 351

Forms of apocryphiar

pluralapocryphiars

Origin of apocryphiar

Coined by war journalist Martha Gellhorn. Blend of apocrypha + liar.

Questions about apocryphiar

What does apocryphiar mean?
Apocryphiar means one who rewrites history to their own advantage or tells self-aggrandizing falsehoods.
What part of speech is apocryphiar?
Apocryphiar is a noun.
What is the plural of apocryphiar?
The plural of apocryphiar is apocryphiars.

Words near apocryphiar in the dictionary

  1. apocryphal
  2. apocryphalist
  3. apocryphalists
  4. apocryphally
  5. apocryphalness
  6. apocryphiar
  7. apocryphiars
  8. apocryphon
  9. apocynaceous
  10. apocyneous
  11. apocynin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: apocryphiar (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “apocryphiar.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/apocryphiar. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.