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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, 25 Feb. 2026
Yas calls Harper to feed her the bogus story that Lisa Dearn suppressed a memo that would have endangered Tender’s application with the banking regulator.
—Amanda Whiting, Vulture, 23 Feb. 2026
Though legitimate immigration court proceedings are conducted in English, the con artists held their bogus court interviews in Spanish to put their victims at ease, according to prosecutors.
—Colin Mixson, New York Daily News, 21 Feb. 2026
And people will still owe federal payroll taxes on tips that are reported as income, Klein said, which means that many do not have a reason to claim bogus income for a bigger but bogus tax deduction on tips.
—Susan Tompor, USA Today, 19 Feb. 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 26 Feb. 2026.
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bogus
adjective
