Meaning
A minor falsehood told to avoid hurting someone's feelings, to be polite, or to smooth over something unimportant, rather than to deceive for personal gain. It implies the speaker bends the truth knowingly but with tactful or kindly intent, and that the matter is trivial enough for the falsehood to be judged forgivable. Neutral-to-informal register; the phrase usually signals tolerance of the falsehood rather than condemnation of it. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The Oxford English Dictionary's revised entry traces the expression to 1567, in a letter by one R. Adderley; the long-standard date of 1741, still cited by Etymonline, reflects an older eighteenth-century first citation that later research antedated. Why the lie is called white is not explained in any early source: the colour had denoted moral purity in English since Old English times (Etymonline records the sense 'morally pure' in Old English and figurative moral purity by about 1200), so white plausibly marks the falsehood as harmless or well-meant, in contrast with darker wrongdoing. That colour reading is inference from documented usage, not a recorded explanation, and should be presented as such.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a little white lie
- little white lies
- tell someone a white lie
- white lies
Usage Examples
- I admitted that my compliment about the haircut had been a white lie, told purely to spare her feelings.
- Telling white lies about liking a gift is harmless enough; he fibs about things that actually matter.
- It was a white lie, she decided, not real dishonesty, to say the delay had been unavoidable.