Word.ws English Dictionary

testilying

testilying noun: the act of a police officer giving false testimony (perjury). Also the present participle and gerund of testilie.

Noun

testilying (uncountable)

  1. (US, euphemistic, informal) The act of a police officer giving false testimony (perjury).
    • Several officers also told us that the practice of police falsification in connection with such arrests is so common in certain precincts that it has spawned its own word: “testilying.“[1994, Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the Anti-Corruption Procedures of the Police Department, Committee Report, page 36
    • “Testilying,” police fabricating evidence or lying in court, is a type of police corruption.2007, Jack R. Greene, “Courtroom testimony and ‘testilying’”, in The Encyclopedia of Police Science, volume 1, page 273

Also used as

testilying is also the present participle and gerund of testilie.

Origin of testilying

Blend of testifying + lying. Coined by New York City police officers, appearing in print in 1994 in the report of the Mollen Commission (see 1994 quotation).

Questions about testilying

What does testilying mean?
Testilying means the act of a police officer giving false testimony (perjury).
What part of speech is testilying?
Testilying is a noun.

Words near testilying in the dictionary

  1. testifying
  2. testilie
  3. testilied
  4. testilies
  5. testily
  6. testilying
  7. testimonial
  8. testimonialise
  9. testimonialised
  10. testimonialises
  11. testimonialising

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: testilying (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: “testilying.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/testilying. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.