Adjective: perfidious
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more perfidious |
| Superlative | most perfidious |
Sample Sentences
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TRINCULO (speaking about Caliban): By this light, a most perfidious and drunken / monster: when his god's asleep, he'll rob his bottle. [1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene ii]:]
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The perfidious Ricimer soon became dissatisfied with Anthe'mius, and raised the standard of revolt. [1851, Oliver Goldsmith, “ch. 26”, in William C. Taylor, editor, Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome:]
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[S]he knew Huntly for the ambitious traitor he was, a man peculiarly perfidious and self-seeking. [1905, Andrew Lang, “ch. 14”, in John Knox and the Reformation:]
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When the Nazis branded Feininger a "degenerate artist" in 1937, he left 54 paintings for safekeeping with a Bauhaus friend named Hermann Klumpp. After the war, and for the rest of Feininger's life, the perfidious Klumpp refused to give them back. [2005 June 21, “Art: The Velocipede of Modernism”, in Time, archived from the original on 12 Nov 2011:]
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Enraged, the 2010 Nobel literature laureate thundered that he was “flabbergasted to learn that this kind of gossip can find its way into a respectable publication such as the Book Review” - a “slanderous and perfidious” instance of the convergence of posh and pop that his book inveighs against. [2015 August 28, John Dugdale, “Mario Vargas Llosa, Hola! and the shallow reading of a review”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:]
Adjectives inflected like perfidious
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
1. Etymology tree
2. Proto-Indo-European *per-
3. Proto-Italic *per
4. Latin per
5. Proto-Indo-European *bʰeydʰ-der.
6. Latin fidēs
7. Proto-Indo-European *-ós
8. Proto-Indo-European *-ós
9. Proto-Indo-European *-ós
10. Proto-Indo-European *-ós
11. Proto-Indo-European *-os
12. Proto-Italic *-os
13. Old Latin -os
14. Latin -us
15. Latin perfidus
16. Proto-Indo-European *-(i)yós
17. Proto-Italic *-ijos
18. Proto-Italic *-ios
19. Old Latin -ios
20. Latin -ius
21. Latin -ia
22. Latin perfidia
23. Proto-Indo-European *h₃ed-
24. Proto-Indo-European *-os
25. Proto-Indo-European *h₃édosder.?
26. Proto-Italic *-ŏ̄dsos?
27. Old Latin -ōssus
28. Latin -ōsus
29. Latin perfidiōsusbor.
30. English perfidious
31. From Latin perfidiōsus (“treacherous”), from perfidia. By surface analysis, perfidy + -ous. See: Latin Adjectives '
perfidiōsus'.