Word of the Day Archive
Saturday March 17, 2007
specious \SPEE-shuhs\ , adjective:
1. Apparently right; superficially fair, just, or correct, but not so in reality; as, "specious reasoning; a specious argument."
2. Deceptively pleasing or attractive.
None of those alleged crises really is. They all rest on specious claims about financial abstractions, on scare stories about impending bankruptcy.
-- James K. Galbraith, Created Unequal
A specious theory is confuted by this free and perfect experiment.
-- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
His descendant later took great pride in these specious titles, and Hawthorne humorously addressed him as "the Count."
-- Edward L. Widmer, Young America
Specious is from Latin speciosus, from species, "appearance," from specere, "to look at."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for specious
