Due to Doctor Who becoming a Long Runner spanning half a century, there are multiple instances of the Doctor and his enemies using trickery with words to outsmart each other.
- "Marco Polo": Ping Cho promises Marco that she won't tell the TARDIS crew where the keys are hidden. She doesn't promise that she won't take them herself and give them to the TARDIS crew.
- "Terror of the Autons": Jo Grant tells the Doctor that she took her A-levels in science. As she herself points out later, she said she took them, not that she passed.
- "The King's Demons": Turlough, asked whether he can call on Hell, says that of course he can, and so can Hugh, and Hugh's more likely to get a response.
- "Silver Nemesis": The Doctor allows the Cyber-Leader to give commands to the superweapon and has the superweapon confirm that it understood those commands. At no point does he instruct it to follow them.
- "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances": Ex-Time Agent Captain Jack Harkness offers to sell Rose a Chula warship that he's parked in WWII London. It turns out that the warship is, in fact, an ambulance. Jack defends himself by pointing out that they have ambulances in wars.
- "The Girl in the Fireplace": The clockwork droids were ordered to repair the ship with whatever parts they could find. As the unlucky crew found out, they considered human parts acceptable...
- "The Age of Steel": John Lumic insists on postponing his own cyber-conversion until "his last breath". Since his life support has just been damaged, the Cybermen immediately take him to a conversion chamber.
- "Partners in Crime": Adipose. The fat just walks away. (By which we mean converted into baby fat aliens thanks to those "miraculous" pills, which then waltz out of your house in the middle of the night.)
- "The Fires of Pompeii" combines it with Loophole Abuse. At the end of the episode, as the town of Pompeii is about to be consumed by the famous volcanic eruption, Donna begs the Doctor to save at least one of the doomed Romans. The Doctor reminds her that the people of Pompeii were already destined to die, and that he risks damaging the time-stream if he changes history. In the end, he relents and saves one average middle-class Roman family. Average people are usually forgotten by history — so he technically didn't change history.
- "The Sontaran Stratagem": The ATMOS in the UNIT jeep was programmed to do precisely the opposite of whatever the Doctor told it. So he tells it to drive into the river.
- "The Doctor's Daughter": The Forever War between humans and Hath has been going on for "many generations" when the Doctor arrives. Due to cloning machines creating full-grown humans and Hath in seconds, said war has gone on for "many generations" despite having only lasted a week.
- "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead": The message sent before the Library was sealed off 100 years before said "4,022 people saved. No survivors." The odd nature of the message is discussed, especially since there are no bodies to be found. It turns out that they were specifically saved to the hard drive of the Library's computer, because it couldn't handle all those people trying to teleport away to escape the Vashta Nerada at once. As a result, there was no one technically alive in the Library anymore.
- "The Next Doctor": The titular character, being a human who merely thinks he's the Doctor thanks to Trauma-Induced Amnesia and an Exposition Beam, does this a couple times.
- His "sonic screwdriver" is just an ordinary screwdriver. As he explains, it's "sonic" because it makes a noise, and he then taps it against the doorframe to demonstrate.
- His TARDIS (Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style) is his transport through time and space. He's referring to the time to himself and space away from others that it grants.
- "The Eleventh Hour": When the Doctor asks where Amelia's parents are, she replies "I don't have a mum and dad." One would assume she means they died, but the end of the season reveals that her mum and dad were wiped from history by the crack in the wall, which in turn resulted in Amelia literally never having had parents.
- "Flesh and Stone": While talking to the Angels, the Doctor tells River to "get a grip". She thinks he's complaining about her not wanting him to sacrifice himself to save everyone, but he gives a bit more information and repeats the phrase. Understanding, River helps Amy get a handhold and gets one herself just as the Byzantium's Artificial Gravity fails and the Angels plummet into a Negative Space Wedgie while our heroes hang on for dear life.
- "Day of the Moon": Played for laughs when Richard Nixon asks if he will be remembered. The Doctor responds in the affirmative but provides no details... then adds, "Say hi to David Frost for me."
- "The Name of the Doctor":
- The prophecy "The Doctor has a secret that he will take to his grave, and it is discovered." No, the speaker didn't mean that the Doctor's secret had been discovered, he meant that he'd managed to find the Doctor's grave — the one point in the future that the Doctor had sworn never to visit.
- At the end of the episode, Clara and the Eleventh Doctor encounter a mysterious figure and the Doctor reveals that the man is him. Clara is confused and expresses how that can't be as she's seen all eleven of the Doctor's faces. The Doctor's response is that "I said he was me. I didn't say he was the Doctor." As was later revealed in "The Night of the Doctor" and "The Day of the Doctor", this unknown man was the Doctor's ninth incarnation, but he stopped calling himself "Doctor" as he felt he no longer had the right to that name due to fighting in the Time War. As such, the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Doctors are the ninth, tenth, and eleventh incarnations to call themselves "the Doctor", but his tenth, eleventh, and twelfth lives.
- "The Time of the Doctor" features a "truth field" that prevents people from telling lies. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver on the wooden Cyberman and tells it that he has sent a signal to reverse the direction of its weapon. The Cyberman knows the Doctor can't be lying, so it reverses its weapon and fires...The Doctor: I probably should have mentioned, this doesn't work on wood.
- A non-comedic example in "Dark Water". After Danny is hit by a car and dies, Clara puts the Doctor to sleep and takes the TARDIS to a volcano, where she threatens to throw all the keys to the TARDIS into lava unless the Doctor agrees to save Danny. Then she finds out the whole thing has been a ruse and took place in her mind. Then, knowing she has betrayed the Doctor's trust, she asks what he plans to do. His response is a deadpan "go to hell". As she turns to leave, he expresses confusion over why she's leaving. After all, he did answer her question. That is exactly where he plans to go to find Danny.
- "Rosa":
- The Doctor uses this tactic when she has to hide two non-white companions, Ryan and Yaz, from a racist police officer in a "Whites Only" motel in '50s Alabama. When the officer describes the two with slurs, the Doctor simply responds that she doesn't know anyone who fits that description, and when the officer says that it's illegal to "harbour coloureds" in a room there, the Doctor responds that she's not harbouring anyone who doesn't have a right to be there.
- During the same scene, Graham claims his name is "Steve Jobs". When the officer asks Graham if he's disrespecting him, Graham says "Steve Jobs would never disrespect a Montgomery police officer." Of course, this says nothing about whether Graham would.
- "Arachnids in the UK": At the end, as Yaz is leaving her flat on an errand, she promises to tell her mum about the Doctor "after she gets back"... and then she hops back in the TARDIS with Ryan and Graham.
- "Demons of the Punjab": Yaz's grandmother Umbreen told her daughter, granddaughters and son-in-law she was the first woman married in Pakistan. She never said who to.
- "Spyfall": Former MI6 analyst O suggests to the Doctor that she should be looking for the "spymaster" behind the whole conspiracy. Then, during Part 1's climax:O: I told you to look for the spymaster, didn't I? Or should I say the spy... Master?
- "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror": Thomas Edison persuades a number of civilians to get off the streets by claiming that Nikola Tesla is experimenting with his Wardenclyffe Tower and there's a chance they could all be blown up. While both statements are true, he lets them assume that correlation equals causation when in reality Tesla's experiments are trying to save them all from being blown up.
- "The Giggle": The Toymaker said that, since he played one game against the First Doctor and one game against the Fourteenth Doctor, "your own rules have decreed I play the third game with the next Doctor." However, because he didn't decree that he would *only* be playing against the next Doctor, he sets off an unprecedented bi-generation, something unheard of outside of Gaifreyan myth.
- A meta-example: when Ncuti Gatwa was announced in 2022 to be taking over the role of the Doctor in Doctor Who, the show's website and social media avoided numbering his incarnation (presumed to be the Fourteenth) in stark contrast to the announcement of his predecessors. This was intentional, as David Tennant's return to the role for the 60th-anniversary specials bumped him up to Fifteenth.
