Phony Meaning
/ˈfoʊni/Definition, CEFR level B2, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
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Definition
adjFraudulent; fake; having a misleading appearance.
nounA person who assumes an identity or quality other than their own.
Sentence Examples
I got sucked in on a lot of phony deals.
My mother says that the child's illnesses are phony.
CEFR Practice Quiz
The art expert discovered that the painting was ____, not a real Van Gogh.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The detective quickly realized that the witness's alibi was completely ____ and full of contradictions.
Word Origin & History
Of unknown origin. Perhaps an alteration of fawny (“gilt brass ring used by swindlers”) (1781), from Irish fáinne (“ring”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"[…] one wonders whether the function of statistical techniques in the social sciences is not primarily to provide a machinery for producing phoney corroborations and thereby a semblance of ‘scientific progress’ where, in fact, there is nothing but an increase in pseudo-intellectual garbage."
— 1970, Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes”, in Imre Lakatos, Alan Musgrave, editors, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science; 4), Cambridge: [Cambridge] University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 176:
"What a deal that was. You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were."
— 1951 July 16, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC, page 164:
"One name was a phony, but the other was the true name. The clerk remembered the man who had filed the tags since he acquired two sets of plates with different names."
— 2013, John E. Douglas, Ann W. Burgess, Allen G. Burgess, Crime Classification Manual, page 131:
Explore More B2 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The art expert discovered that the painting was ____, not a real Van Gogh.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The detective quickly realized that the witness's alibi was completely ____ and full of contradictions.