Word.ws English Dictionary

lirt

lirt verb: to deceive; beguile.

Verb (1)

lirt (third-person singular simple present lirts, present participle lirting, simple past and past participle lirted)

  1. (UK, dialectal, transitive) To deceive; beguile.
  2. (UK, dialectal, transitive) To cheat; befool.

Noun

lirt (plural lirts)

  1. (UK, dialectal) Deception; guile.
  2. (UK, dialectal) A cheat; a go-by.

Verb (2)

lirt (third-person singular simple present lirts, present participle lirting, simple past and past participle lirted)

  1. (UK, dialectal, transitive) To toss.
  2. (UK, dialectal, intransitive) To walk or move in a quick, lively, or pert manner.
  3. (UK, dialectal, intransitive) To gambol; frisk.

Forms of lirt

Verb
third-person singular presentlirts
present participlelirting
past participlelirted
pastlirted
alternative form (obsolete)lirte
Noun
plurallirts

Origin of lirt

From Middle English lirten, lurten (“to cheat”), from Old English *lyrtan (found only in belyrtan (“to deceive”)), from Proto-West Germanic *lurtijan (“to deceive”), from Proto-Indo-European *lerd- (“to bend, crook”). Cognate with Scots lirt (“to cheat, deceive, delude”), Middle High German lürzen (“to deceive”), Middle High German lerz, lurz, lorz (“left, left-handed”), Old English lort, lyrt (“crooked”).

Origin obscure. Perhaps alteration of lirk (“to jerk”).

Words that rhyme with lirt

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about lirt

What does lirt mean?
Lirt means to deceive; beguile.
What part of speech is lirt?
Lirt can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of lirt?
The past tense of lirt is lirted.

Words near lirt in the dictionary

  1. lirophthalmy
  2. lirot
  3. liroth
  4. LIRR
  5. LIRs
  6. lirt
  7. lirted
  8. lirting
  9. lirts
  10. Liruk
  11. lirula

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lirt (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.

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