crocodile tears

1. 1.

   a hypocritical display of sorrow; false or insincere weeping

   “the secretaries wept crocodile tears over the manager's dilemma”

   “politicians shed crocodile tears over the plight of the unemployed”

   Broaderhypocrisy

Questions about crocodile tears

What does crocodile tears mean?

crocodile tears means "a hypocritical display of sorrow; false or insincere weeping".

Is crocodile tears a common word?

crocodile tears is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.