دروغ گو

What it means

دروغ‌گو (dorugh-gu) is the Persian word for a liar, someone who tells lies. It is a noun and an adjective at once: a دروغ‌گو is a liar, and a person who is دروغ‌گو is dishonest. The word is built transparently from دروغ (dorugh, a lie) and the present stem گو (gu) of the verb گفتن (goftan, to say). The literal sense is lie-sayer, and the construction is one of Persian’s most productive word-building patterns.

The verb form دروغ گفتن (dorugh goftan, to lie) is already covered in our glossary as a separate entry. Dorugh-gu names the person who does that act habitually enough to wear the label. Calling someone دروغ‌گو is a serious accusation in Persian, less a description of one act and more a statement about character.

How to use it

Dorugh-gu functions as both noun and adjective. As a noun: یک دروغ‌گو (yek dorugh-gu, a liar). As an adjective: آدم دروغ‌گو (adam-e dorugh-gu, a dishonest person). The intensive form دروغ‌گوی قهار (dorugh-guye qahhar, a master liar) is used for chronic, accomplished liars.

oun bachche kheyli dorugh-gu ast.

That child lies a lot.

آن بچه خیلی دروغ‌گو است.

be harf-e ye dorugh-gu etemad nakon.

Don’t trust the words of a liar.

به حرف یک دروغ‌گو اعتماد نکن.

oun yek dorugh-guye qahhar bud.

He was a master liar.

او یک دروغ‌گوی قهار بود.

The X-gu pattern

The suffix-like ending ـگو (-gu, sayer) attaches to many Persian nouns to build agent nouns: راست‌گو (rast-gu, truth-teller), قصه‌گو (qesseh-gu, storyteller), پاسخ‌گو (pasokh-gu, one who answers, accountable), بدگو (bad-gu, one who speaks ill, a gossip). Recognize the pattern and you can decode dozens of words without a dictionary. The pair دروغ‌گو and راست‌گو is the cleanest example, the moral binary made into vocabulary.

Where it comes from

Both halves of the word are native Persian, going back to Middle Persian and beyond. دروغ (dorugh) descends from Old Persian drauga, a lie or falsehood, which in Zoroastrian thought stood as the cosmic opposite of اشه (asha, truth). The same word appears in the Behistun inscription of Darius I, who lists drauga as the chief threat to his rule. گو (gu) is the present stem of the inherited verb گفتن (goftan, to say), itself one of the oldest Persian verbs. The compound dorugh-gu is therefore a doubly native word, two ancient Persian elements joined by the basic compounding pattern.

In our voice

Calling someone dorugh-gu in Persian is not a casual jab. The word reaches all the way back to a Zoroastrian moral framework in which lying was the primary cosmic evil. Iranians still feel that weight, even if they cannot name where it comes from.

References

• Dehkhoda, دروغگو
• Vajehyab, دروغگو