Adjacent Words

phoney definitions

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WordNet (r) 3.0 (2005)

adj
1: fraudulent; having a misleading appearance [syn: bogus, fake, phony, phoney, bastard] n
1: a person who professes beliefs and opinions that he or she does not hold in order to conceal his or her real feelings or motives [syn: hypocrite, dissembler, dissimulator, phony, phoney, pretender]

Merriam Webster's

I. adjective see phony I II. noun see phony II

Oxford Reference Dictionary

adj. & n. (also phony) colloq. --adj. (phonier, phoniest) 1 sham; counterfeit. 2 fictitious; fraudulent. --n. (pl. -eys or -ies) a phoney person or thing. Derivatives: phonily adv. phoniness n. Etymology: 20th c.: orig. unkn.

Collin's Cobuild Dictionary

also phony(phoneys) 1. If you describe something as phoney, you disapprove of it because it is false rather than genuine. (INFORMAL) He'd telephoned with some phoney excuse she didn't believe for a minute... ADJ [disapproval] 2. If you say that someone is phoney, you disapprove of them because they are pretending to be someone that they are not in order to deceive people. (INFORMAL) He looks totally phoney to me. ADJ [disapproval] • Phoney is also a noun. 'He's false, a phoney,' Harry muttered. N-COUNT

Moby Thesaurus

artificial, bogus, charlatan, counterfeit, counterfeiter, deceitful, deceiver, dishonest, double-dealer, ersatz, factitious, fake, faker, false, forgery, fraud, fraudulent, hoax, humbug, hypocritical, imitation, impostor, insincere, mock, mountebank, paste, phony, pretended, pretender, quack, sham, spurious, synthetic, trickster, unreal