How to Use perfidious in a Sentence

perfidious

adjective
  • We were betrayed by a perfidious ally.
  • Boys who sing songs about perfidious ex-girlfriends risk sounding like jerks, or worse.
    — Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, 31 May 2021
  • Elena—most perfidious of all—turns her best friend’s life into a best-selling novel.
    — Elaine Blair, The New York Review of Books, 24 Sep. 2020
  • Elena—most perfidious of all—turns her best friend’s life into a best-selling novel.
    — Elaine Blair, The New York Review of Books, 8 Sep. 2020
  • It's been Agatha all along — and her very own insidious, perfidious spinoff is now in the works.
    — Brendan Morrow, The Week, 7 Oct. 2021
  • This is perhaps the most perfidious practice of this sort of politics.
    — David M. Drucker, Twin Cities, 3 June 2026
  • So much of what citizens know of our perfidious former president has come from her writing and reporting.
    — Keith L. Runyon, The Courier-Journal, 17 Nov. 2022
  • The new heroes are black and white women determined to clean up the mess created by Fowler and his perfidious white financial backer.
    — Tony Adler, Chicago Reader, 11 May 2018
  • For those trying to read Iran’s future, the lesson of 1953 is not just that foreign powers can be perfidious.
    — Bobby Ghosh, Time, 5 Mar. 2026
  • This latest version, originating in the Kremlin, is just a new, perfidious variant of the old virus called anti-Semitism.
    — Michael Brenner, Smithsonian Magazine, 29 June 2022
  • Her Ashley is the movie’s fourth and fifth wheel, dismissed as both a perfidious troublemaker and a New Age airhead—a life coach in need of a wife coach.
    — Justin Chang, New Yorker, 22 Aug. 2025
  • Countries also find ways to live with them, and they can be used as a rhetorical device—unfair sanctions imposed by a perfidious West—to tighten a ruler’s grip on power.
    — Tom McTague, The Atlantic, 23 Feb. 2022
  • The country needed a leader and much of the public and news media found it in the gruff, uncharismatic, and perfidious form of Andrew Cuomo.
    — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 3 Aug. 2021
  • If Washington’s forays are conspicuous and its aims perfidious, its partners will not abet the next undertaking.
    — Mira Rapp-Hooper, Foreign Affairs, 3 Oct. 2019
  • But what’s truly unprecedented about this bill is the range of organizations that its supporters hope to cleanse of perfidious foreign influence.
    — Casey Michel, The New Republic, 27 June 2022
  • The government took a genuine invitation to collaborate as a perfidious power grab.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker, 14 Mar. 2026
  • That perfidious history is not the sole reason Fair Park First and its outside park-makers and master-planners chose this location.
    — Robert Wilonsky, Dallas News, 25 Feb. 2020
  • But writer Rob Engalla’s perfidious hand movements were their undoing.
    — Vulture, 10 Mar. 2023
  • But showing care for others, in the Republican party’s political trauma era, is a perfidious weakness.
    — Rich Logis, The New Republic, 13 Oct. 2022
  • Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency.
    — A.o. Scott, New York Times, 3 Feb. 2026
  • According to Barnum’s version of events, he was ruined by a perfidious business partner, who tricked him into endorsing half a million dollars’ worth of promissory notes.
    — Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 29 July 2019
  • The result is a cacophonous temper tantrum, a vacuous and perfidious advertisement for military recruitment.
    — Gregory Nussen, Deadline, 28 Mar. 2025
  • What chance has an export health certificate against the Royal Navy sending the perfidious French invaders scurrying back to Europe?
    — Fintan O’Toole, The New York Review of Books, 13 May 2021
  • Few would dispute the need to confront China on its perfidious treatment of its Uighur minority, not to mention various other human rights abuses in the country.
    — Ike Brannon, Forbes, 2 Sep. 2021
  • Some have warned of a perfidious plot to revive the British empire with help from Muslims, particularly Shias, who revere the Prophet’s descendants.
    — The Economist, 5 Apr. 2018
  • The British, who ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, were particularly perfidious.
    — Washington Post, 30 Oct. 2020
  • The real mystery in this perfidious tale is why the FBI decided to advance the dossier hoax to the world, thus weakening America and its presidency.
    — WSJ, 6 June 2022
  • Even Macron, for all his warnings about perfidious Albion, must realize that Europe’s high-pressure Brexit strategy hasn’t worked any wonders.
    — Washington Post, 24 Sep. 2019
  • Even by that relatively late date, when the authoritarian nature of the regime was already clear, Jacobin was defending it against its perfidious neoliberal critics.
    — Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, 28 June 2017
  • In what might sound to many Americans like a familiar tactic, Netanyahu cast his critics and not himself as a threat to the country’s security, and sought to position himself as a victim of perfidious judges and prosecutors.
    — Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times, 27 Mar. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'perfidious.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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