Lying by Omission

Shirogane: I've never been turned down in my life!
Narration: Not a lie, since he's never confessed his love to anyone.

— Kaguya-sama: Love Is War

This is a statement that is clearly literally true but doesn't give the whole truth, used instead of outright lying. Usually done because it avoids making a Snowball Lie and there's no inconsistencies to tip the audience/listener that a lie has been told. But this also might be done due to the presence of something that punishes or prevents direct lies, to bypass a Living Lie Detector, or they're just someone who really Will Not Tell a Lie. Perhaps it's done to preserve a veil of Plausible Deniability to hide behind when inevitably confronted for their blatantly self-serving story ("I didn't have the whole story!").

If none of those are true and there's no risk in lying directly, it might just be because the speaker is a Trickster that wants to engage in wordplay.

Misleading with the truth has two ways to do it:

1. Creating a difference between the speaker's truth and the meaning they intend their listener to get, such as the speaker saying "X will happen", where the speaker means "happens eventually" instead of the "happens soon" that the listener assumes. Often overlaps with Exact Words but not Mathematician's Answer.
2. Satisfying only the question asked, like asking if a Human Subspecies is a human while searching for that subspecies. A "yes" is still correct because they're a type of human. Often able to overlap with Mathematician's Answer.

See Metaphorically True for those cases (like "Darth Vader betrayed and murdered your father") that depend on a really shaky technicality or turn of phrase, in that case, that those were two separate people, and physical murder instead of the same person, being changed by a decision. Some instances of Justice by Other Legal Means can also involve tricking the suspect into incriminating themselves with lies of omission, for example saying that the investigating agency doesn't have jurisdiction and omitting that another agency does.

Supertrope to:

• Asbestos-Free Cereal: An advertising trope where a true but irrelevant fact about the product is presented as a positive.
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: The use of statistics to mislead, usually by oversimplifying the results from real studies to make the conclusions sound more definitive and farther-reaching than the authors intended.
• Never Needs Sharpening: An advertising trope where a true negative fact about the product is presented as a positive.
• Push Polling: Manipulating a poll's result to push an agenda.
• Quote Mine: Taking the words someone actually said, but changing their apparent meaning by removing necessary context.
• Sarcastic Confession: Telling the truth in such a way that your listeners will believe you're joking or lying.
• Selective Stupidity: Cherry-picking a survey's responses to make a certain demographic look stupid.

Compare and contrast with:

• Exact Words: A statement that while literally true, has a letter that's untrue to the spirit instead of directly omitting anything, though the intent to deceive and adherence to the letter means they often overlap.
• False Reassurance: An answer that sounds reassuring but actually means the opposite; it's equally likely to involve a lie of omission or a Metaphorically True claim.
• Mathematician's Answer: Another form of Exact Words, but this time an overly logical reply to the question-as-asked (and not the question the speaker clearly meant). May sometimes be used to deceive, but far more likely to be used for obstructive pedantry or Straw Vulcanry.
• That Came Out Wrong: When a character tries to tell the truth, but accidentally misleads others through poor phrasing.
• Villains Never Lie: When a villain manipulates by telling the truth. Overlaps if the villain's truth is only partial in nature.
• You Didn't Ask: Omitting information because you weren't asked for it, not because of an intent to deceive.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Bungo Stray Dogs: After Chuuya loses a bet, Dazai offers him another chance by proposing they bet on who can solve the mystery behind the dead boss sightings first, with the loser having to obey the winner. However, Dazai neglects to mention that he already solved the case, and thus Chuuya has no shot at winning.
• Everything Ryuk says in Death Note is true. The problem is that he never gives you the entire context. Like his telling Light not to think a human who's used a Death Note is able to go to Heaven or Hell actually means there's no afterlife for anyone. Though Light already figured that to be the case on his own.
• Delicious in Dungeon: When Senshi joins Laios' team in exploring the dungeon, he tells them that he's been living off the dungeon for more than ten years. He's actually been there for 76 years and has a Dark and Troubled Past.
• I Think Our Son Is Gay: Hiroki's still in the closet, so when he is pressed to tell some of his friends about his crush in Chapter 28, he describes Daigo truthfully but without using pronouns, so as to let his friends assume he's talking about a girl.
• Kaguya-sama: Love Is War: Shirogane states a fact about his love life, which implies a false reality, that the narration calls him out on:
  Shirogane: I've never been turned down in my life!
  Narration: Not a lie, since he's never confessed his love to anyone.
• My-HiME: This is Nagi's entire M.O. He will tell the girls something important, but he will omit key details. He tells each of them that if they choose to fight, they'll have to risk what is most precious to them. By which he means the person they love most in the world. In another episode, he tells them HiME aren't allowed to fight each other. Yet. Doing so would reveal the first half-truth before his master, the Obsidian Prince, awakes. Essentially, if Nagi says something, it's true, but not the whole truth.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Kyubey does this with pretty every magical girl he contracts, leaving out vital details about what it means to be a magical girl, like the fact that your soul gets ripped out and turned into a gemstone or that you inevitably turn into the very witches you fight. Kyubey claims that he doesn't understand how omitting information is considered deceptive and is confused when humans get mad about it.
• Everything Xellos from Slayers says is true, but he never gives the right context. If directly asked to elaborate, he says his Catch Phrase "Sore wa himitsu desu" ("It's a secret").

Fan Works

• The Dimensional Drifter: Several people, in order to hide their status as Dimensional Travellers, use half-truths when asked about their origin. A common line is that they're "out of town". Such things are also used for other things, such as when Judai is trying to hide that Yuto and Kurosaki came from a warzone — he calls them "teenagers with trust issues".
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: The God of Good-collective-provided truth-detection magic circles flash green for truth and red for lies, and said in "Skirmishing" to have problems with questions like "Are you human?" for a Uneven Hybrid that's majority human, where it would allow "Yes" as a truthful answer, letting them keep their possibly demonic ancestry hidden:
  This kind of half-truth was one aspect where the magic could have problems with.
• The GiW meets its match: In "Compounding Disaster Control", When the truth about the Guys In White wanted to nuke the Amity Park gets to the CDC, one scientist complained that they were told that it was just a dirty bomb. Lt Charles pointed out that a nuke is a dirty bomb, just one that can be lobbed thousands of miles.
• Inter Nos: Shizuru learns that a governor has been selling Himean citizenship illegally and allowing exorbitant usury rates by tax collectors who double as money lenders. She tells him if he puts a list together of everyone to whom he sold the citizenship, refrains from doing so in the future, and restricts the lenders' fees, she won't bring charges against him in bribery court. She doesn't tell him that she sent a full account of his transgressions to her fellow Senator, Mai Tokiha, who will be the one to bring charges.
• The Mountain and the Wolf: When trying to reassure Tyrion as to his sister's fate (since Cersei's body is nowhere to be found in the ruins of King's Landing), the Wolf tells him it's certain Cersei is aboard a ship (implying she's halfway to Essos by then). He should know; he abducted Cersei the day of the attack and she's currently held prisoner onboard the Wolf's ship.

Films — Animated

• Aladdin and the King of Thieves: An oracle tells Aladdin that his father, Cassim, is trapped within the world of the Forty Thieves. Well, he is. It's just that Cassim is not only there voluntarily, he's their leader, and what he's trapped by is his own greed.
• In Rango, the leader of the mariachi band says that Rango will die. The movie's plot progresses and he's still alive and well to see the end credits. When one of the band members questions the narrator on this, he says that Rango will still die — someday, because everyone does.
• In Tangled, Flynn Rider's opening narration includes the phrase "This is the story of how I died." He then hurriedly adds that the audience shouldn't worry because it's actually a very fun story and it isn't really even about him, thus leading you to understand that he was pulling your leg. Except he wasn't. He does die, in point of fact. He omits that he doesn't stay dead.

Films — Live-Action

• The Cannonball Run: The state police pull over the ambulance of J.J. McClure and company, and inquire why an ambulance is driving hella fast on the interstate. When told McClure is transporting a patient, Nikolas Van Helsing emerges and explains that the patient cannot withstand the pressurized compartments of an airliner, and that only a specialized treatment in California can save her. The police ask Van Helsing if he's really a doctor, and he affirms that he is. What he omits is that he's a doctor of veterinary medicine, specializing in bovine prolapses; he's completely out of his depth as an attending physician.
• In Goldfinger, Goldfinger offers his creditors a tenfold increase in repayment of the gold he owes them if they wait for the completion of his plan to break into Fort Knox. While they conclude he means to just steal the gold, he actually intends to just set off a nuclear bomb inside, changing the value of the gold he's paying them.
• Kissing Jessica Stein: When Jessica's mother asks why she's so happy lately, Jessica replies that there's no boy involved. She's actually dating Helen.
• Knives Out: Marta is literally unable to tell a lie without immediately puking, and lying by omission is just about her only defense when being questioned during a murder investigation. When Benoit interviews her about her whereabouts the night of Harlan's death, she — choosing her words very carefully — says that as his nurse, she took him upstairs around midnight, gave him his pain medication, then went home, excluding the fact that to her knowledge, she had accidentally given him a fatal overdose. She still ends up vomiting once the interview is over and is out of sight.
• Liar Liar inverts this when Fletcher becomes unable to lie at all, resulting in a large amount of traffic tickets.
• The Pink Panther Strikes Again: Played for Laughs when Clouseau visits a hotel that has a dog in the lobby, asks the manager "Does your dog bite?", is answered "No", and gets bitten as soon as he tries to pet it.
  Clouseau: I thought you said your dog did not bite!
  Manager: That is not my dog.
• Used in several of the Star Trek films, mostly by Spock.
  • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan has the first case: Spock informs Captain Kirk by communicator that "going by the book, like Lieutenant Saavik, hours would seem like days" before reporting that the Enterprise would need two days to have secondary power restored... "By the book, Admiral". After Kirk's away team gets stranded on Regula I by Khan:
    Kirk: [opening communicator] Kirk to Spock, it's two hours, are you ready?
    Spock: Right on schedule, Admiral.
    Saavik: [Soon after, on the Enterprise] I don't understand. We were immobilized. Captain Spock said it would be two days.
    Kirk: Come, come, Lieutenant. You of all people go by the book: "If communications are being monitored during battle..."
    Saavik: "...no uncoded messages on an open channel." [turns to Spock, astonished] You lied.
    Spock: I exaggerated.
  • Star Trek (2009): Emotions are stigmatized on Vulcan, so Spock's father Sarek claims that "marrying your mother was logical", disappointing Spock with the clinical response. He later clarifies in a more vulnerable moment — it's logical to marry the one you love.
• Star Wars:
  • Attack of the Clones: Count Dooku unsuccessfully attempts to persuade Obi-Wan Kenobi to switch sides to the Separatists by expounding on the corruption of the Republic Senate and that the Republic is now under the control of the Dark Lord of the Sith. This is, in fact, literally true, but for obvious reasons, he omits the part where Darth Sidious is also his own master and is simultaneously puppeteering the Separatists.
  • The Last Jedi: Kylo Ren manages to fool a Mind Probe like this. Reading his thoughts, his Evil Mentor Snoke sees Kylo "turning the lightsaber to strike true, and now... he ignites it, and kills his true enemy!" Kylo is holding one lightsaber to Rey's chest, but the lightsaber he ignites, telekinetically, is the one resting at Snoke's side, pointing straight at Snoke.

Literature

• Alexis Carew: Mutineer: Falsely surrendering is forbidden under the Fictional Geneva Conventions. After being deliberately marooned in a non-FTL-capable shuttle in enemy territory by Captain Neals, Alexis hails an enemy cutter and pretends to be a terrified midshipman with a drunken crew. The other captain demands she formally surrender as a condition of him helping her, and she replies that, "It would appear I have no choice in the matter." Well, appearances can be deceiving: she leads a Boarding Party onto the enemy ship, captures it, and sails it back to base.
• Played for Laughs in L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Windy Poplars, when Anne, a teacher at the local school, is invited for dinner at the Taylor family's home. The father, Cyrus Taylor, is in the middle of one of his sulking fits, making dinner quite an awkward affair as he refuses to speak. Anne uses some Exact Words to imply to a visiting guest that Mr. Taylor has suddenly gone deaf in an effort to trick him into speaking, but when he doesn't deny it, it inspires the Taylor children to gleefully collaborate by implying their father is guilty of all sorts of offenses but never once stating he is guilty of them ("What would you think, Dr. Carter, of a man who makes his family live on fruit and eggs...nothing but fruit and eggs...just for a fad?," "What would you think of a husband who bit his wife when she put up curtains he didn't like...deliberately bit her?," "What would you think of a man who would go to a funeral...his father's funeral...in overalls?"). The final straw comes when his wife gets in on it, and mentions how beautifully "he" crochets without ever mentioning him by name. Mr. Taylor erupts in fury, trying to defend his reputation, before admitting he had it coming and the whole thing was Actually Pretty Funny.
• Books of the Raksura: When Stone first meets Moon and invites him to Indigo Cloud Court, he tells Moon that he's bringing back a present for his great-great-granddaughter Jade. The present turns out to be Moon himself — unknown to Moon, he's an eligible Consort for a Queen like Jade. Lampshaded later by Moon's relief that Stone didn't pretend the omission was anything but a lie.
• In Kylie Chan's Dark Heavens series, Mr. Chen is a wealthy Hong Kong businessman. When asked the source of his wealth, he prefers to reply that he does some martial arts training and various circumstances for the government, as well as some fieldwork before his daughter is born. If he's asked whether he means the Hong Kong or continental Chinese government, he says "above either," generally taken to mean he's with the UN. Inevitably, people assume he's a spy, and to THAT question he says he can't discuss it. In fact, he's a god in the Celestial Bureaucracy and being, amongst other things, god of martial arts, he spends a lot of time teaching it to other gods.
• Discworld:
  • In A Hat Full of Sky, "never lie, but don't always tell the truth" is among the pieces of advice Miss Tick gives Tiffany.
  • Monstrous Regiment: Jackrum often says "Upon my oath, I am not a dishonest/violent man". While the intended meaning is "but look what you made me do", the truth is that she is actually a woman.
  • Thief of Time: "No monk here knows deja-fu! I'd soon hear about it if they did." This is true. None of the Time Monks know how to use time itself as a weapon in martial arts. Lu-Tze, however, is not a Time Monk...
  • Carrot does this surprisingly frequently when negotiating with hostile characters. However, he has never (as far as anyone can prove) told a direct lie. In fact, he has a tendency to use the truth as a weapon. Both he and his it's-complicated Angua have told someone impeding their progress that unless the person stands down, they'll be forced to carry out the orders they were given regarding resistance, and that they'll regret it terribly if they do, but they won't have any choice. In the circumstances, an implied threat is very clear — Shame If Something Happened. However, the orders on both occasions were "leave the offending party alone, and see if you can find a workaround in this morass." The people they're sort of threatening never notice.
    "Sergeant Colon was lost in admiration. He'd seen people bluff on a bad hand, but he'd never seen anyone bluff with no cards."
  • The witches at the end of Wyrd Sisters are quite clear in their own minds that they've told everyone the truth; Tomjon and the Fool are half-brothers, and Verence is the older. If people want to assume that Verence is therefore the illegitimate son of the King and Mrs Fool, and entitled to claim the throne if Tomjon doesn't want it, rather than Verence being the illegitimate son of the elder Fool and the Queen, that's their problem.
• In the Dragaera series, Anti-Hero Vlad Taltos is a mob boss required to testify "under the orb" (that is, under magical lie detection) when a neighboring boss disappears. Among other applications of this trope, Vlad tells the prosecutors "as far as I'm concerned, he committed suicide." By treating Vlad like he wanted to die.
• The Dresden Files: Faeries Cannot Tell a Lie but can deceive people in every other way short of speaking a deliberate untruth. In Cold Days, Harry belatedly realizes Cat Sith misled him about an important meeting by answering the letter of Harry's questions, not volunteering important information, and listening while Harry came to the wrong conclusions.
• Elydes: From Chapter 48: Kai wants to keep his little sister Kea out of trouble, so he badgers a local hunter, Moui, into taking her on as an apprentice. Moui has a condition, though, wanting to know if she's as annoying as Kai is. Kai pauses, then promises that "my sister is one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. I've never known someone as kind and patient as she is," which is an accurate description of his other sister.
• In the Flashman novel Royal Flash Flashman swears that he will let a mook who has tried to kill him go, if he tells him what he wants to know. The mook tells and Flashman lets him go ... over a cliff and into a chasm. He said he would let him go!
• In The Inheritance Cycle, the Ancient Language can't be used to speak falsehood. Aware of partial truths, elves have a special gesture to promise that they won't use omission to mislead each other.
• The Last Binding: When Robin is interrogated with a spell that compels truthful answers, he finds that not only does the magic allow Exact Words and lies of omission, it seems to enjoy them. In particular, he can agree that someone "would have hidden" the MacGuffin in a particular place, leaving out that he doesn't think it's actually there anymore.
• The Locked Tomb: It's mentioned in "As Yet Unsent" that The Empire likes to trap other governments in Leonine Contracts that expire upon The Emperor's death, not mentioning that he's a 10 000-year-old Immortal Ruler.
• In Holly Black's Modern Faerie trilogy, pixie Kaye invokes this to fulfill a quest to find a faerie who could lie, which is impossible. She succeeds by claiming SHE can lie. She can lie...on the ground.
• More Than You'll Ever Know has a false murder confession that uses Gory Discretion Shot to imply "I killed him" while not actually lying about that. Lore confesses to Cassie that she killed Andres, Taking the Heat for someone else. She was 11 or 12 weeks pregnant, cramping and bleeding, and terrified she was miscarrying. When her lover Andres confronted Lore about her Secret Other Family, he shoved her—not enough force to be dangerous most of the time, but enough to be dangerous to a pregnancy only holding on by a thread to begin with. A wave of Mama Bear terror for her baby seized Lore, and then... Gory Discretion Shot. Except Gory Discretion Shot is just a storytelling technique, not an actual event that can occur. The part of the story that Lore does not tell Cassie is that after Andres shoved her, he stepped back, afraid of his own potential for violence, and both lovers left the encounter alive.
• In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the narrator's documentation of the case never lies, but omits key details.
• Old Kingdom: Mogget's Restraining Bolt prevents him from lying, but he misleads people quite well with selective truths. In Clariel, he makes an Unwitting Pawn of the title character by telling her that Free Magic spirits will serve her for life (if she can force them to), that she can use The Dark Side temporarily without harm (with lots of skilled help afterwards to heal its corruption), and that he's helping her to gain his freedom (by bringing down the Old Kingdom).
• In Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, the Villain Protagonist Penelope Akk is able to fool her Living Lie Detector Mother Beatrice "The Audit" Akk by setting up events so that she can make a true statement about a few of her actions (and Confess to a Lesser Crime or use an Infraction Distraction in a pinch), letting her mother assume that she told her the entirety of her actions.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: "Boyfriends and other Minor Annoyances": Selvi says Starsinger disappeared, when asked about its location, the narration notes "honestly if not accurately", because while it did disappear in the previous Episode, she knows where it ended up.
• The Raven Tower: Gods often deceive in this way because they Cannot Tell a Lie, such as by using "I have heard" to qualify statements that aren't true. Crucially, when the god in the Raven Tower of Vastai is asked if it's the Raven, it proclaims that it's the god of Vastai, the god responsible for sustaining the nation, and the only god in the Tower. It's actually the god the Raven had secretly dumped his duties on. The Raven is dead.
• In The Silence of the Lambs Clarice Starling tells Dr. Hannibal Lecter that her father was a marshal. Later on, when she is recounting to him how the man died, Lecter catches enough clues to easily deduce that the man had actually been a night watchman. Starling's defense is that the official job description had read "night marshal".
• At the end of The Ship Who... Won, Plennafrey intends to give up her items of power to leave Ozran with Keff. Carialle takes her aside and gives her a presentation about the dangers of space travel and the ways that Plenna's biology has diverged over the past thousand years, which ends with Plennafrey bursting into tears, having been given the impression that her blood is too thin to allow her to be healthy in space. Therefore, as she understands how important Keff's work is to him, they can't be together. Keff, who does like Plenna but isn't in love with her, privately asks Carialle about this presentation. Carialle says she's been truthful - there's no guaranteeing anyone's safety in space. Luckily for Plenna, a new suitor immediately proposes to her and she loses all carnal or romantic interest in Keff instantly.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • The Aes Sedai swear a magically binding vow "speak no word that is not true", ostensibly to build trust. In practice, they're infamous as masters of tactical omissions, tricky diction, and every other form of deception. While the mostly-heroic Moiraine is in disguise, she tells people "You may call me Mistress Alys" — they certainly may; it just isn't her real name.
    Tam al'Thor: An Aes Sedai never lies, but the truth she speaks may not be the truth you think you hear.
  • When Siuan is convicted of a minor crime, she swears a solemn oath to serve her sentence by working under Gareth Bryne. She flees town that night, rationalizing that she never said when she'd serve it, and will come back when she's dealt with more urgent business.
• In the Warrior Cats book Mapleshade's Vengeance, Mapleshade's kits were fathered by a cat from another Clan, but her own Clan assumes that the father was their recently deceased Clanmate Birchface, and Mapleshade doesn't correct them - for instance, when Frecklewish asks, assuming this is the case, and offers to help raise them due to believing them to be kin, Mapleshade says only "You have answered my prayers, Frecklewish. My kits and I are no longer alone." She justifies it to herself by thinking "I have not lied out loud" and that it'll help the Clan accept the kits, and that she'll tell the truth eventually.
• Where Are the Children?: If anyone asks what brought Nancy to the small Cape Cod town she moved to six years ago, she tells them she moved there for a fresh start after her parents died. This is technically true; she just omits the part where she was married to a college professor and accused of murdering her children in California.
• In World of the Five Gods, Dowager Royina Ista tells the story of the death of Arvol dy Lutez four times across both The Curse of Challion and Paladin of Souls. In all but the last, she conceals the underlying reason he died, that in the heat of the moment, when she was going to call down a miracle of healing to resurrect dy Lutez for their threefold sacrifice scheme, she hated him and excluded the Mother from her heart, preventing the miracle.
• X-Wing: Solo Command: Nawara Ven offers Dr. Edda Gast immunity from prosecution for war crimes in exchange for telling the New Republic how to test for and reverse her chemical brainwashing protocols. They give her a new identity and enough money to retire in comfort, but she insists on being paid in Imperial credits. Knowing that she's probably just going to offer her services to another Imperial Remnant warlord, Nawara deliberately doesn't warn her that trying to transit a New Republic port with that much enemy currency carries a life sentence for sedition, and, still thinking her Karma Houdini status is in effect, she's promptly arrested by a customs officer when she tries to catch a flight off Coruscant.

Live-Action TV

• Bones: Sweet figures out that the suspect in the Murder of the Week also probably committed the rape they uncovered in their investigation. Booth points out in the suspect's hearing that even if that's true, the FBI wouldn't be able to charge him with both crimes. The suspect thinks he sees a way out and confesses to the rape, and is promptly told he just confessed to murder. When the perp calls them out on lying, Booth explains that the reason they can't charge him with both is that the FBI only has jurisdiction on the murder; he omitted that the Washington, D.C. police have jurisdiction on the rape case.
• On Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, the duo use this trope to get environmental activists to sign a petition to ban water. They sent someone to a gathering of them to get names for a petition to abolish the use of "dihydrogen monoxide" — which means water. They went around saying all kinds of technically true things about water (things like "it's a chemical solvent", which is true, and "over six thousand people are killed by this stuff in the US every year", which is also true) while making it sound like a toxin. They got lots of names. The point of the exercise was to demonstrate how many people would sign a petition without bothering to check any of the facts first.
• Quincy, M.E.: A kidnapper manages to get himself arrested by the police without the victim being recovered. Quincy figures out from the forensic evidence that the victim was stashed on the grounds of a national park, and the state prosecutor throws the case in exchange for the victim's exact location. The kidnapper is then arrested by the FBI while walking out of the courtroom, and the state prosecutor helpfully explains that because he kidnapped the victim in California but stashed them on federal land, the FBI also has jurisdiction in the case.

Mythology and Religion

• The Bible: In the Book of Genesis, Joseph's brothers (unlike in the musical adaptation) don't actually lie to their father Jacob that Joseph is dead. They just give him Joseph's coat, which they stained with goat's blood, and say "We found this," leaving him to draw the conclusion that Joseph was eaten by a wild animal. They leave out the fact that they found the coat still being worn by Joseph, and that they ripped it off him before throwing him into a pit and then selling him into slavery.

Sports

• After the Covid crisis forced the cancellation of the 2020 minor league baseball season, several minor league teams printed t-shirts commemorating their "undefeated season".

Theater

• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: During the final sequence of the play, it's revealed that Mrs. Lovett knew all along that Lucy Barker, Sweeney's wife, was still alive. She told him that Lucy had poisoned herself after her rape by Judge Turpin, and despite Mrs. Lovett never outright stating it, anyone would have come to the conclusion that Lucy was dead. But what Mrs. Lovett never told Sweeney was that Lucy survived her poisoning and had to be committed to Bedlam House, becoming the Beggar Woman; and the reason she never let him know was because she wanted Sweeney for herself. Because of this deception, Sweeney never found out that Lucy was still alive until he had already killed her himself prior to taking final vengeance on Judge Turpin.
• In the climactic scene of Wicked, Elphaba receives a letter about Fiyero. After reading it, she simply tells Glinda, "We've seen his face for the last time," making both Glinda and the audience think the letter contains the news of Fiyero's death. Actually, the letter is from Fiyero, informing Elphaba that he's alive but urging her not to let anyone know. What Elphaba says about his face is technically true, but it's because Elphaba changed his face forever by turning him into the Scarecrow, which saved his life.

Video Games

• Fable: In the Non Violent Initial Confrontation between Jack of Blades and the Hero, Jack says that the Hero's Missing Mom now "lives in complete solitude, tormented by her failure to save her family", and that he longs to reunite them. He has her in a dungeon and wants the Hero there too.
• Prayer of the Faithless: Aeyr is sent to an inadvertent Suicide Mission because completing it will turn him human again, which he wants to be. But, what's left unsaid is that he'll die as a result, due to how the environment he'd be in would be lethal to humans.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • Franchise-wide: Some witnesses will only reveal information when specifically asked about it. Miles Edgeworth would use this method for coaching witnesses during his days as the Demon Prosecutor.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations: In Godot's introduction, he claims to have never lost a case, making him appear legendary until he reveals he hasn't won any case either: It's his first time acting as a prosecutor.

Webcomics

• Freefall:
  • Sam makes his procedure for getting some contract work sound a lot more straightforward and honest than it actually was by carefully leaving out several important points: Max Post is a "Bible salesman" because he illegally smuggles them to the robots, they "exchanged the business cards in [their wallets]" by pickpocketing each other, and Max was "glad" to point Sam to the office where he got the contract because it was an effective way of getting Sam to shut up, to name a few.
  • Invoked when Clippy makes a highly illicit flight to a secret base as part of a criminal conspiracy. Being a Robot, he's a Bad Liar and can just be ordered to tell the truth, so his hirelings ask him to hide in a closet — if he's questioned, he can say that he was hiding there during the flight, omitting that it was his flight.
    Mr. Parka: Just because something is true doesn't mean it's not a lie.
• Doc Scratch of Homestuck constantly does this; however, he also insists that he doesn't tell lies and that lies of omission aren't real, but merely a human construct by creatures who feel entitled to the full truth. Only he, as an omniscient being, can know the full truth at any given time, and when and how he chooses to dispense that information is entirely up to him. As such, while he does withhold critical information with statements that are Metaphorically True, it only makes him a scoundrel and a prankster, not a liar, and the fault lies with those who aren't asking the right questions.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • When the Order are accused of attempting a prison break, the Lawful Goodinvoked Durkon claims that the cell doors opened due to a "mechanical defect" and omits that the defect was that the locks could be picked by a rogue.
  • In a case of Never Speak Ill of the Dead regarding the destruction of Soon's Gate, O-Chul admits that he made the decision and it was his blade that did the deed. But he was magically paralyzed at the time; Miko destroyed the gate right before they were about to win the fight.
  • The arch-fiends who offer Vaarsuvius a Soul Splice make several true but deceptive statements while negotiating: that they each get V's soul for the same amount of time as the Splice lasts (not necessarily after V's death, so they can yank V into Hell at a bad time), that the Splice could influence V's actions (if only by giving V a load of Black Magic and cheering V on), and that "We simply don't need to trick you if we can get what we want by playing it straight" (if indeed).
  • Malack, when explaining his god Nergal, gives a brief lecture about how death gods and their clerics shouldn't be stereotyped as evil: good and evil people alike all have to die eventually, so the role is more Neutral. He leaves out any direct statement about Nergal or himself, since by all appearances Nergal is a God of Evil who exults in mass slaughter and Malack is a vampire who's plotting an Industrialized Evil regime in his name.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Brave and the Bold: In "Clash Of The Metal Men", Gas Gang wanted to make a gas that can cause volcanic eruptions to sell to despots and dictators but told their partner Doc Magnus, the creator of titular Metal Men, they're doing it to make the world better. They just omitted who it's good for (themselves).
• Norman Normal 1999: In "Trading Places", Morpheus, a boy with a power of Voluntary Shapeshifting, tells the titular protagonist that he wants to make the world better. Later he reveals that he's a supervillain and wants to depower the protagonist's family. When Norman calls him out on his lying, Morpheus said he was telling the truth and he meant what was he saying: he wants to make the world better. He omitted why it would be better, and for who: the world without superheroes is an ideal world for the petty supervillain like himself.
• Young Justice (2010): While discussing potential new recruits for the Justice League, the current members start debating whether or not Captain Marvel should be allowed to remain a member since in truth he's ten years old. Wonder Woman in particular argues that the issue is not just that he is a minor, but that he lied about it to the team. When Captain Marvel retorts that he didn't really lie but simply left it out, Wonder Woman replies with "a lie of omission is still a lie".

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