Word.ws English Dictionary

phoney

phoney is the alternative form of phony.

Meaning of phony

Adjective

phony (comparative phonier, superlative phoniest)

  1. (informal) Fraudulent; fake; having a misleading appearance.
    • A good jeweler should be able to tell a real stone from a phony one.
    Synonyms:
    bogus, counterfeit, fake

See all 5 meanings of phony

Forms of phoney

Adjective
comparativephonier
superlativephoniest
Noun
pluralphoneys
pluralphonies
Verb
third-person singular presentphoneys
present participlephoneying
past participlephoneyed
pastphoneyed

Words formed from phoney

Phrases with phoney

Words that rhyme with phoney

38 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about phoney

What is phoney the alternative form of?
Phoney is the alternative form of phony.

Words near phoney in the dictionary

  1. phonetizing
  2. phoneward
  3. phonewise
  4. phoneword
  5. phonewords
  6. phoney
  7. phoney up
  8. phoney war
  9. phoney-baloney
  10. phoneyed
  11. phoneyed up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: phoney (page history and authors); phony (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-phoney.ogg.

Cite this entry: “phoney.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/phoney. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.