bogus

(bō'gəs)
adj.
Counterfeit or fake; not genuine: bogus money; bogus tasks.

[From obsolete bogus, a device for making counterfeit money.]

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adjective

Fraudulently or deceptively imitative: counterfeit, fake, false, fraudulent, phony, sham, spurious, suppositious, supposititious. See true/false.

adj

Definition: counterfeit
Antonyms: authentic, genuine, real

Origin: 1797

Around the time we were getting used to being a new nation, we Americans contributed something bogus to the English language. At first, apparently, it was only money. A glossary defining bogus as a "spurious coin" was published in 1798, indicating that the word must have been coined at least as early as 1797. Its origins are obscure, but one guess that is as good as any is that it is from boko, meaning "deceit" or "fake" in the Hausa language of west central Africa. The word then would have been brought over by Africans sold into slavery here.

Once it was introduced into our language, the word bogus circulated widely, and it began to count for more than coins. A machine to make bogus coins was also called a bogus, at least in Painesville, Ohio, in 1827. By 1848 bogus could be counterfeit paper money too. In fact, by midcentury, bogus could be anything fake, as it is nowadays. For example, we read of a bogus legislature in 1852, bogus lottery tickets in 1856, bogus life insurance companies in 1859, bogus jewelry in 1860, and a bogus piano tuner in 1887. Since the late nineteenth century it has also meant something that is simply no good, a use of bogus that persists in slang of the present day.

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1. Non-functional. “Your patches are bogus.”

2. Useless. “OPCON is a bogus program.”

3. False. “Your arguments are bogus.”

4. Incorrect. “That algorithm is bogus.”

5. Unbelievable. “You claim to have solved the halting problem for Turing Machines? That's totally bogus.”

6. Silly. “Stop writing those bogus sagas.”

Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break. So is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a scientific problem. (This word seems to have some, but not all, of the connotations of random — mostly the negative ones.)

It is claimed that bogus was originally used in the hackish sense at Princeton in the late 1960s. It was spread to CMU and Yale by Michael Shamos, a migratory Princeton alumnus. A glossary of bogus words was compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized there about 1975-76. These coinages spread into hackerdom from CMU and MIT. Most of them remained wordplay objects rather than actual vocabulary items or live metaphors. Examples: amboguous (having multiple bogus interpretations); bogotissimo (in a gloriously bogus manner); bogotophile (one who is pathologically fascinated by the bogus); paleobogology (the study of primeval bogosity).

Some bogowords, however, obtained sufficient live currency to be listed elsewhere in this lexicon; see bogometer, bogon, bogotify, and quantum bogodynamics and the related but unlisted Dr. Fred Mbogo.

By the early 1980s ‘bogus’ was also current in something like hacker usage sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had gone mainstream by 1985. A correspondent from Cambridge reports, by contrast, that these uses of bogus grate on British nerves; in Britain the word means, rather specifically, ‘counterfeit’, as in “a bogus 10-pound note”. According to Merriam-Webster, the word dates back to 1825 and originally referred to a counterfeiting machine.

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For a list of words related to bogus, see:

• Foolishness, Bunkum, and Trifles
• Bad, False, Evil, Insincere, or Dishonest
• Falsehood, Pretense, and Exaggeration - bogus: (adj) not genuine; counterfeit

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See words rhyming with "bogus."

  See crossword solutions for the clue Bogus.

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Dansk (Danish)
adj. - falsk, forfalsket, forloren

Nederlands (Dutch)
nep-, vals

Français (French)
adj. - faux, bidon, factice

Deutsch (German)
adj. - falsch, gefälscht

Ελληνική (Greek)
adj. - πλαστός, κάλπικος, ψεύτικος, πλασματικός

Italiano (Italian)
falso

Português (Portuguese)
adj. - adulterado

Русский (Russian)
фальшивый, притворный

Español (Spanish)
adj. - falso, postizo

Svenska (Swedish)
adj. - fingerad, falsk, bluff

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
假的, 伪造的

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
adj. - 假的, 偽造的

한국어 (Korean)
adj. - 가짜의

日本語 (Japanese)
adj. - 偽の

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(صفه) كاذب, زائف, مصطنع‏

עברית (Hebrew)
adj. - ‮מלאכותי, מזוייף‬

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