Meanings
plural lie-detectors
- alternativeAlternative form of lie detector.
Simon and his best man were sitting in the den watching one of the news channels. A pr flack was defending the use of Sanderson MedTech’s new lie-detectors in screening job applicants.
1999 October, Stephen Dedman, “The Lady Macbeth Blues”, in David Pringle, editor, Interzone, number 148, →ISSN, page 43, column 23 more examples
No one denies that a certain amount of rough treatment is meted out to prisoners at police stations, especially those who have been difficult or dangerous to arrest and have previously assaulted the police. But there is nothing here to compare with the ‘brain-washing’ of totalitarian regimes, or the frequent use of so-called lie-detectors or truth drugs, as used in America.
1962, Josephine Bell [pseudonym; Doris Bell Collier], “The Police”, in Crime in Our Time, London; New York, N.Y.; Toronto, Ont.: Abelard-Schuman, →LCCN, part five (The Law and Its Administration), page 160Certainly [Thaddeus] Bulgarin’s world of the future, with its prefabricated buildings, dehydrated food, self-propelled cars, sea farms, lie-detectors and emotion-analysing machines, was a very advanced one even by early nineteenth-century standards (Vaslef, 1968, p. 37).
1969, W[alter] H[arry] G[reen] Armytage, “Preface”, in The Russian Influence on English Education, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York, N.Y.: Humanities Press, →ISBN, page xiApart from the disclosures in the New York Times (27 April 1966) and in several issues of Ramparts, there is an outstanding study by Christopher Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War: a Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom”, in Towards a New Past, ed. B. J. Bernstein (New York, 1968) which addresses itself especially to as much of the history of Encounter as can be discovered without the use of lie-detectors.
1978, E[dward] P[almer] Thompson, “An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski”, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, New York, N.Y.; London: Monthly Review Press, →ISBN, footnote 71, page 402
Cite this entry
lie-detector. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/lie-detector
“lie-detector.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/lie-detector. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “lie-detector,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/lie-detector.
Source: lie-detector on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.