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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
Brian Boucher, ARTnews.com, 29 Apr. 2026
Criminals develop fake friendships or romantic relationships with victims over time, eventually persuading them to deposit funds into bogus cryptocurrency investment platforms.
—Alexandra Koch, FOXNews.com, 29 Apr. 2026
So all of these stories are bogus, bad, tasteless.
—Julia Moore, PEOPLE, 29 Apr. 2026
Others joined him in making the bogus threats.
—ABC News, 29 Apr. 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 6 May. 2026.
Copy CitationKids Definition
bogus
adjective
