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Oh what a tangled web we weave / When first we practise to deceive! So wrote Sir Walter Scott in his 1808 poem Marmion. Scott’s line wasn't written with etymology in mind, but it might be applied to the history of "fallacious." That word traces back to the Latin verb fallere ("to deceive"), but it passed through a tangle of Latin and French forms before it eventually made its way into English in the early 1500s. Other descendants of "fallere" in English include "fail," "false," and "fault."

Examples of fallacious in a Sentence

it's fallacious to say that something must exist because science hasn't proven its nonexistence consumers who harbor the fallacious belief that credit-card spending will never catch up with them

Recent Examples on the Web Thank goodness that investment bankers are constantly undoing the fallacious assumptions of an economic profession married to the belief that inflation is caused by too much investment. — John Tamny, Forbes, 9 May 2021 Please keep all of this mind the next time some self-serious economist starts drooling about output gaps, overheating, and other fallacious notions so popular inside the economics profession. — John Tamny, Forbes, 11 Apr. 2021 One of the more shallow and fallacious claims Padilla makes in the Times piece is that classicists and the field of classics share responsibility for the Capitol riot that took place on January 6th. — Andre M. Archie, National Review, 27 Feb. 2021 Commentators have relied on fallacious allusions to the developing world to explain a problem unique to the United States. — Laura Weiss, The New Republic, 11 Jan. 2021 However, experts in the mathematics of probability have identified the inference from the fine-tuning to the multiverse as an instance of fallacious reasoning. — Philip Goff, Scientific American, 10 Jan. 2021 The annals of science brim with fallacious orthodoxies. — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 22 Dec. 2020 Better engagement beyond the capital might have exposed such fallacious assumptions. — John Campbell, Quartz Africa, 3 Dec. 2020 Fact-checking labels are having little effect on curbing people’s enthusiasm for fallacious Facebook posts by President Donald Trump. — Robert Hackett, Fortune, 17 Nov. 2020

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'fallacious.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.