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Bogus Has a Long History
In her 1840 novel A New Home—Who’ll Follow?, author Carolina Kirkland wrote about a scandal affecting the fictitious frontier town of Tinkerville, whose bank vaults were discovered to contain “a heavy charge of broken glass and tenpenny nails, covered above and below with half-dollars, principally ‘bogus.’ Alas! for Tinkerville, and alas, for poor Michigan!” Alas indeed. Bogus (an apparent U.S. coinage) was first used in the argot of wildcat banks (like the one in Tinkerville) as a noun referring to counterfeit money. It later branched out into adjective use meaning “counterfeit or forged.” Although the noun is now obsolete, the adjective is still used today with the same meaning, and is applied not only to phony currency but to anything that is less than genuine, making it part of a treasury of similar words ranging from the very old (sham) to the fairly new (fugazi).
Examples of bogus in a Sentence
Tim Carter, Hartford Courant, 16 Aug. 2025
Just look at the bogus allegations made by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, repeated as fact by Democrats in Congress and their allies in the media, that border agents were whipping and abusing migrants.
—Riley Moore, MSNBC Newsweek, 15 Aug. 2025
Her office said scammers were able to access peoples’ accounts or trick users into sending money to bogus accounts that posed as official businesses.
—Dave Smith, Fortune, 14 Aug. 2025
There wasn't a bogus risk pool involved to make things easy for the Tax Court.
—Jay Adkisson, Forbes.com, 12 Aug. 2025
See All Example Sentences for bogus
Cite this Entry
“Bogus.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bogus. Accessed 28 Aug. 2025.
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bogus
adjective
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