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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
Los Angeles Times, 17 Jan. 2026
The latest warning, however, comes courtesy of Bleeping Computer in response to multiple contacts from readers in receipt of reply comments that led to bogus account login sites.
—Davey Winder, Forbes.com, 16 Jan. 2026
Bilal has previously been slammed with allegations of wild offenses ranging from spending department money on promotional items like trading cards with her likeness to having bogus news stories about her being generated by AI.
—Alex Nitzberg, FOXNews.com, 9 Jan. 2026
But many other videos may truly be bogus.
—James Warren, Chicago Tribune, 8 Jan. 2026
See All Example Sentences for bogus
Cite this Entry
“Bogus.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bogus. Accessed 22 Jan. 2026.
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bogus
adjective
