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Bogus - 6 dictionary results
bo⋅gus
[boh-guh
s] 
–adjective
| 1. | not genuine; counterfeit; spurious; sham. |
–noun
| 2. | Printing, Journalism. matter set, by union requirement, by a compositor and later discarded, duplicating the text of an advertisement for which a plate has been supplied or type set by another publisher. |
Synonyms:
1. fraudulent, pseudo, fake, phony.
1. fraudulent, pseudo, fake, phony.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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|
Link To Bogus
| bo·gus (bō'gəs) adj. Counterfeit or fake; not genuine: bogus money; bogus tasks. [From obsolete bogus, a device for making counterfeit money.] |
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Cite This Source
Bogus
Bo"gus\, a. [Etymol. uncertain.] Spurious; fictitious; sham; -- a cant term originally applied to counterfeit coin, and hence denoting anything counterfeit. [Colloq. U. S.]Bogus
Bo"gus\, n. A liquor made of rum and molasses. [Local, U. S.] --Bartlett.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
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bogus
adj.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".
Jargon File 4.2.0
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bogus
"counterfeit money," 1839, Amer.Eng., apparently from a slang word applied in Ohio in 1827 to a counterfeiter's apparatus. Some trace this to tantrabobus, a late 18c. colloquial Vermont word for any odd-looking object, which may be connected to tantarabobs, recorded as a Devonshire name for the devil. Others trace it to the same source as bogey.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
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