Word.ws English Dictionary

testilie

testilie verb: to commit perjury (as a police officer).

Verb

testilie (third-person singular simple present testilies, present participle testilying, simple past and past participle testilied)

  1. (US, euphemistic, informal) To commit perjury (as a police officer).
    • In Manhattan, grand jury prosecutors are urged to interview police officers separately if there is any possibility they may be fabricating evidence or about to testilie.1999 January, Larry Cunningham, “Taking on Testilying”, in Criminal Justice Ethics, volume 18, →DOI, pages 26–40
    • Higher rank officers in New York advocated that those officers who testilied should not be prosecuted because testilying was a police tradition.2007, Jack R. Greene, “Courtroom testimony and ‘testilying’”, in The Encyclopedia of Police Science, volume 1, page 274

Forms of testilie

third-person singular presenttestilies
present participletestilying
past participletestilied
pasttestilied

Origin of testilie

Blend of testify + lie. Possibly a back-formation from the noun testilying, which appeared a few years earlier and is more common.

Questions about testilie

What does testilie mean?
Testilie means to commit perjury (as a police officer).
What part of speech is testilie?
Testilie is a verb.
What is the past tense of testilie?
The past tense of testilie is testilied.

Words near testilie in the dictionary

  1. testifies
  2. testifiest
  3. testifieth
  4. testify
  5. testifying
  6. testilie
  7. testilied
  8. testilies
  9. testily
  10. testilying
  11. testimonial

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: testilie (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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