deny

Here the verb disputes a claim, and it takes three shapes: a that-clause (I deny that I was there), a pronoun (he still denies it), or an -ing form (deny seeing anyone). The -ing form is the living pattern. An infinitive after the verb belongs to the obsolete "refuse to" use. Denying a claim is not disproving it, because the speaker asserts and does not show.

A double-object verb: you deny someone something, with the person first and the thing second, as in my father denied me a good education. The person can become the subject of a passive, which makes for compact headlines, such as the BBC's Mother denied daughter's organs (2008). Jonathan Edwards (1754) gives it a reflexive turn: to deny an inclination rather than gratify it is to withhold it from oneself.

The refusing sense sits closest to the word's root. It comes from Latin denegare, built from de- "away" and negare "to refuse," which goes back to a Proto-Indo-European *né, "no, not." Its natural opposite is grant, and it moves easily into the passive: I was denied. Mark Kurlansky's Cod (1997) stretches it to arguments, where an argument that denies a history refuses to let that history count.

This is the sense of Peter's story, in which denying a person means refusing to own them as yours. The Gospel scene colors its use, and John Keble's line "thou thrice denied, yet thrice beloved" (The Christian Year, 1827) turns on it. The object can also be a belief. George Bancroft writes of "the falsehood of denying his opinion," where the fault lies in disowning what one actually holds.

A sports reporter's verb whose object is the attacker, not the goal: the keeper denies the forward, or a striker is denied by a save. It names the single moment a chance is stopped rather than a whole defensive display. That is why match reports cluster it around saves and stops, as in BBC Sport's account of Rubin Kazan against Tottenham (2011), where Cudicini makes stop after stop.