Bogus

5 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Bogus \Bo"gus\, a. [Etymol. uncertain.]
     Spurious; fictitious; sham; -- a cant term originally applied
     to counterfeit coin, and hence denoting anything counterfeit.
     [Colloq. U. S.]
     [1913 Webster]



From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Bogus \Bo"gus\, n.
     A liquor made of rum and molasses. [Local, U. S.] --Bartlett.
     [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  bogus
       adj : fraudulent; having a misleading appearance [syn: {fake}, {phony},
              {phoney}, {bastard}]

From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:

  60 Moby Thesaurus words for "bogus":
     affected, apocryphal, artificial, assumed, bastard, brummagem,
     colorable, colored, counterfeit, counterfeited, distorted,
     dressed up, dummy, embellished, embroidered, ersatz, factitious,
     fake, faked, false, falsified, feigned, fictitious, fictive,
     forged, fraudulent, garbled, illegitimate, imitation, junky,
     make-believe, man-made, mock, perverted, phony, pinchbeck,
     pretended, pseudo, put-on, quasi, queer, self-styled, sham, shoddy,
     simulated, snide, so-called, soi-disant, spurious, supposititious,
     synthetic, tin, tinsel, titivated, twisted, unauthentic, ungenuine,
     unnatural, unreal, warped
  
  

From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:

  bogus adj. 1. Non-functional. "Your patches are bogus." 2. Useless.
     "OPCON is a bogus program." 3. False. "Your arguments are bogus." 4.
     Incorrect. "That algorithm is bogus." 5. Unbelievable. "You claim to
     have solved the halting problem for Turing Machines? That's totally
     bogus." 6. Silly. "Stop writing those bogus sagas."
  
     Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break. So
     is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a scientific
     problem. (This word seems to have some, but not all, of the connotations
     of {random} -- mostly the negative ones.)
  
     It is claimed that `bogus' was originally used in the hackish sense at
     Princeton in the late 1960s. It was spread to CMU and Yale by Michael
     Shamos, a migratory Princeton alumnus. A glossary of bogus words was
     compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized there about
     1975-76. These coinages spread into hackerdom from CMU and MIT. Most of
     them remained wordplay objects rather than actual vocabulary items or
     live metaphors. Examples: `amboguous' (having multiple bogus
     interpretations); `bogotissimo' (in a gloriously bogus manner);
     `bogotophile' (one who is pathologically fascinated by the bogus);
     `paleobogology' (the study of primeval bogosity).
  
     Some bogowords, however, obtained sufficient live currency to be
     listed elsewhere in this lexicon; see {bogometer}, {bogon}, {bogotify},
     and {quantum bogodynamics} and the related but unlisted {Dr. Fred
     Mbogo}.
  
     By the early 1980s `bogus' was also current in something like hacker
     usage sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had gone mainstream by
     1985. A correspondent from Cambridge reports, by contrast, that these
     uses of `bogus' grate on British nerves; in Britain the word means,
     rather specifically, `counterfeit', as in "a bogus 10-pound note".
     According to Merriam-Webster, the word dates back to 1825 and originally
     referred to a counterfeiting machine.