On this page14 sections
- Quick picker
- Lies as things that are made
- Lies as webs and woven cloth
- Lies as covers and screens
- Lies as wrong paths
- Liars as animals and faces
- Lies by colour and size
- Lies that grow and travel
- Metaphors for believing a lie
- A model paragraph
- Choosing the right image
- Common mistakes
- Practice
- Quick answers
English talks about lies as things that are made (a fabrication, a story cooked up), woven (a web of lies, a tissue of lies, spin), used to cover the truth (a cover-up, a whitewash, a smokescreen) or to lead people the wrong way (a red herring, a garden path). Liars become snakes, wolves in sheep’s clothing and people who are two-faced, while a harmless lie is a white lie and a lie that grows out of control snowballs.
This page groups those images by the picture behind them, explains what each one suggests, gives the origin where it is actually known, and shows which ones suit an essay, a story or a conversation. For fixed expressions such as “lie through your teeth” and “pull someone’s leg”, see our separate list of idioms for lying; here the focus is the metaphors, the pictures English uses to think about lies. For the wider topic of honesty, see metaphors for truth.
Quick picker
| You want to describe… | Try |
|---|---|
| a lie that was invented from nothing | a fabrication; cooked up; concocted; made up out of thin air |
| a set of lies that trap the liar | a tangled web; a web of lies |
| a story that is entirely false | a tissue of lies; a pack of lies |
| hiding a wrong | a cover-up; a whitewash; papering over the cracks; burying the truth |
| a distraction from the truth | a smokescreen; a red herring; smoke and mirrors |
| a false account that will collapse | a house of cards |
| a small, kind lie | a white lie; a fib |
| a lie that keeps growing | the lie snowballed; a spiral of lies |
| a truth bent but not broken | stretching the truth; economical with the truth; spin |
| a person who lies | a snake; a snake in the grass; a wolf in sheep’s clothing; two-faced; forked tongue |
| making someone doubt their own memory | gaslighting |
Lies as things that are made
The oldest picture is that a lie is manufactured. Fabricate comes from the Latin fabricare, “to build, to make”, and for centuries meant simply to construct something; the sense “to invent a false story” grew from that. The same idea runs through everyday English:
- made up / made up out of thin air: invented with nothing real behind it. “The quote was made up out of thin air; he never said it.”
- cooked up, concocted, dreamed up: put together like a recipe or a dream. “They cooked up an excuse about a flat tyre.”
- cook the books: falsify accounts. “The auditors found the books had been cooked for years.”
- a house of cards: a structure of claims that collapses as soon as one is pulled out. “His alibi was a house of cards; one phone record brought it down.”
- a facade, a front: a false surface on a building, behind which something else goes on. “The charity was a front for a betting ring.”
These suit news writing and essays because they say a lie was deliberate: someone took the trouble to build it.
Lies as webs and woven cloth
The most quoted line about lying comes from Walter Scott’s poem Marmion (1808): “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practise to deceive!” It is often credited to Shakespeare, but it is Scott’s. The image says that one lie needs another to hold it up, until the liar is caught in their own web.
- a web of lies / a web of deceit: connected lies that trap people, sometimes the liar. “The detective pulled one thread and the whole web of lies came apart.”
- a tissue of lies: an account that is false all the way through. Tissue here means a fine woven fabric, its original sense.
- spin a yarn: tell a long, unlikely story. Usually explained as sailors’ talk from spinning rope yarn while swapping tales; it suggests entertainment more than malice.
- spin / a spin doctor: presenting facts in the most favourable light. Spin is not always outright lying; it twists true facts rather than inventing false ones. “The press office put a positive spin on the job cuts.”
- the story unravelled: a lie coming apart like knitting. “Her account unravelled once the dates were checked.”
Lies as covers and screens
Here the truth exists and the lie is a layer put over it.
| Metaphor | The picture | Example |
|---|---|---|
| a cover-up | a lid or sheet over something | “The cover-up did more damage than the original mistake.” |
| whitewash | cheap white paint over a dirty wall | “Critics called the report a whitewash that cleared everyone.” |
| paper over the cracks | wallpaper hiding damage without fixing it | “The statement papered over the cracks in the partnership.” |
| bury the truth | putting it underground | “The safety warning was buried on page 40 of the report.” |
| a mask | a false face | “His charm was a mask; colleagues only saw the temper later.” |
| a smokescreen | military smoke that hides troop movements | “The row over parking was a smokescreen for the budget cuts.” |
| smoke and mirrors | a stage magician’s tools | “The ‘record profit’ was smoke and mirrors: a one-off sale of land.” |
Note that bury, whitewash and paper over can describe hiding a problem without telling an actual lie. That is often exactly the point of using them: they accuse someone of dishonesty while staying a step short of “liar”.
Lies as wrong paths
- lead someone up (or down) the garden path: mislead them step by step, often with something that sounded pleasant.
- a red herring: a false clue that draws attention away from the real one. The story usually told is that the journalist William Cobbett wrote in 1807 of using a strong-smelling smoked herring to pull hounds off a hare’s trail. Crime writers use the term for planted false clues.
- throw someone off the scent: the same hunting picture, from the hound’s side.
- lead someone astray: take them off the right road, morally or factually.
Liars as animals and faces
| Metaphor | What it says about the liar | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| a snake / a snake in the grass | hidden, ready to strike, not to be trusted | Virgil’s Eclogues has “a snake lurks in the grass” (latet anguis in herba); the serpent of Genesis deceives Eve |
| a wolf in sheep’s clothing | dangerous but looks harmless | the Gospel of Matthew (7:15) warns of false prophets who come “in sheep’s clothing” |
| speak with a forked tongue | says one thing and means another | a snake’s split tongue; common in nineteenth-century American writing |
| two-faced | shows different faces to different people | the Roman god Janus is often pictured with two faces, though he was a god of doorways, not of lying |
| a weasel; weasel words | slippery, evasive | weasel words were popularised by Theodore Roosevelt in a 1916 speech, for words that suck the meaning out of a statement |
| Pinocchio; “his nose is growing” | an obvious liar, often said playfully | Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), where the puppet’s nose grows when he lies |
Lies by colour and size
A white lie is a small lie told to be kind or polite: “I said I loved the scarf, a white lie.” White here means harmless, as it often does in English moral language. A fib is a small, usually trivial lie, a word mostly used with children. At the other end, a barefaced (US also bald-faced) lie is told openly, without even a beard to hide behind, and a whopper is an enormous one.
Truth can also be bent rather than broken. Stretching the truth pulls it out of shape, as you might stretch a sweater. Economical with the truth, meaning sparing with it, became famous when the British civil servant Robert Armstrong used it in a 1986 court case, though the idea is much older; it means telling only part of what is true.
Lies that grow and travel
- a lie snowballs: like a snowball rolling downhill, it picks up more each time. “One lie about the deadline snowballed into a fake progress report.”
- a spiral of lies: each lie forces a worse one.
- a lie travels fast and truth limps behind: Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710 that “Falsehood flies, and Truth comes limping after it”. The later version about a lie running around the world while the truth puts on its shoes is often pinned on Mark Twain, without evidence.
- the truth will out / come to light: the reverse picture, of hidden truth surfacing. Shakespeare uses both in The Merchant of Venice.
- gaslighting: lying so persistently that the victim doubts their own memory. It comes from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light (filmed in 1944), in which a husband dims the gas lights and tells his wife she is imagining it.
Metaphors for believing a lie
English also has pictures for the person on the other end. Most treat a lie as food or as bait:
- swallow a story: accept it without chewing it over. “Nobody swallowed his story about the dog and the passport.”
- fall for it / fall for it hook, line and sinker: like a fish that takes the bait, the line and the weight. “She fell for the prize email hook, line and sinker.”
- be taken in: let into a trap. “Even the bank manager was taken in by the forged letters.”
- be sold a bill of goods (US): cheated with a worthless promise, like a buyer handed a list of goods that never arrive.
- take something with a pinch of salt: the opposite, accepting it only with doubt.
A model paragraph
Here is how a few of these images can work together in a short piece of writing without clashing:
For three months Daniel’s story held. The new job, the flat by the river, the boss who loved him: it was a house of cards, but a well-built one, and his parents swallowed every word. Then his sister found the unpaid rent letters, and the whole thing came down in an afternoon. What hurt them most was not the lie itself but how carefully it had been made.
Notice that the paragraph uses one main picture (the house of cards) and one small one for believing (swallowed). Two images are usually the limit before a passage starts to feel crowded.
Choosing the right image
| Situation | Fits well | Avoid |
|---|---|---|
| formal essay or report | fabrication, cover-up, whitewash, smokescreen, spin | fib, whopper, Pinocchio |
| story or novel | tangled web, house of cards, mask, snake in the grass | stacking three images in one sentence |
| talking to a child | fib, Pinocchio, “is your nose growing?” | gaslighting, snake |
| a kind or social lie | white lie | tissue of lies, web of deceit (far too strong) |
| accusing someone without saying “liar” | economical with the truth, stretching the truth, spin | barefaced lie (it is a direct accusation) |
Common mistakes
- Using overreaction phrases for lying. “Make a mountain out of a molehill” and “blow something out of proportion” mean overreacting, not lying. Someone can exaggerate a problem in good faith.
- Using hiding-from-yourself phrases. “Bury your head in the sand” means refusing to face a problem; it is denial, not deceiving others. “Bottle up your feelings” is not lying either.
- Calling every plan a lie. “Hatch a plan” and “castle in the air” (a daydream) are not about deception.
- “Mirrors and smoke”. The fixed order is smoke and mirrors.
- Treating spin as the same as lying. Spin selects and frames true facts. If the facts themselves are false, call it a fabrication.
- Mixing pictures. “He whitewashed the web of lies” clashes paint with spider silk. One image per sentence.
Practice
Choose the best metaphor for each gap.
- She told her grandmother the cake was perfect, a harmless ______.
- The minister’s speech about parking fees was a ______ to stop questions about the hospital.
- Each excuse needed another excuse, and soon he was caught in a tangled ______.
- One bank statement was enough to bring his whole story down like a ______.
- The inquiry cleared everyone involved; campaigners called it a ______.
- Is “she made a mountain out of a molehill” a metaphor for lying?
Answers: 1. white lie. 2. smokescreen (or red herring). 3. web. 4. house of cards. 5. whitewash. 6. No. It is a metaphor for overreacting; she may sincerely believe the problem is big.
Quick answers
What is a metaphor for a lie?
Common ones are a web (a tangled web of lies), a house of cards, a smokescreen, a cover-up, a whitewash and a mask. Each pictures the lie as something built, woven or laid over the truth.
Who wrote “Oh, what a tangled web we weave”?
Walter Scott, in the poem Marmion (1808). It is often wrongly credited to Shakespeare.
What is a metaphor for a liar?
A snake, a snake in the grass, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a weasel, a Pinocchio, or a two-faced person. “Snake” suggests danger; “Pinocchio” is lighter and often teasing.
Is “white lie” a metaphor?
Yes. The lie has no colour; white stands for harmless, the way white often stands for innocence in English.
What is the difference between a metaphor and an idiom for lying?
A metaphor is the picture (lies as a web); an idiom is a fixed phrase whose meaning you have to learn (“pull someone’s leg”). Many idioms are frozen metaphors. Our page of idioms for lying lists the fixed phrases; the figurative language guide explains the terms.