misrepresent

If you deliberately mislead someone — for example, by lying about your work experience at a job interview — you misrepresent yourself, or paint a false picture of who you are.

The verb misrepresent can be a relatively gentle way to say "lie," or it can mean more of a bending of the truth. You might misrepresent the reliability of an old car you're trying to sell or accidentally misrepresent an author's intentions in a school book report. The word itself is built from the Old English prefix mis-, which means "bad or wrong," and represent, or "depict, describe, or symbolize."