phony
/ˈfoʊni/
phony adjective: fraudulent; fake; having a misleading appearance.
Adjective
phony (comparative phonier, superlative phoniest)
- Fraudulent; fake; having a misleading appearance.
- A good jeweler should be able to tell a real stone from a phony one.
- […] 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...
- Synonyms:
- bogus, counterfeit, fake
Noun
phony (plural phonies)
- A person who assumes an identity or quality other than their own.
- He claims to be a doctor, but he's nothing but a fast-talking phony.
- 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
- A person who professes beliefs or opinions that they do not hold.
- He's such a phony, he doesn't believe half of what he says.
- Synonyms:
- faker, dissembler, pretender, fake, bamboozler, bouncer, bullshitter, cheat, cheater, cogger
- Anything fraudulent or fake.
- 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
Verb
phony (third-person singular simple present phonies, present participle phonying, simple past and past participle phonied)
- To fake.
phony meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Nepali and Arabic
phony in Hindi
- a person who professes beliefs or opinions that they do not hold
- कपटी kapṭī
phony in Tamil
- போலி, உண்மையற்ற, தவறான, ஏமாற்றும்
phony in Nepali
- फोनी
phony in Arabic
- fraudulent; fake
- بَهْرَج bahraj, خَرَّاص ḵarrāṣ
- a person who assumes an identity or quality other than their own
- مُتَصَنِّع mutaṣanniʕ
- a person who professes beliefs or opinions that they do not hold
- مُتَصَنِّع mutaṣanniʕ, مُنَافِق munāfiq
Examples of phony in a sentence
- This is an example of what magicians (and unfortunately phony psychics) call a "cold read".
- “He works for the insurance company, protecting stores from phony claims.
- Phony cheese dip that someone sticks in a microwave and then they pour it on a tostito.
Synonyms of phony
26 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Antonyms
Forms of phony
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | phonier |
| superlative | phoniest |
| alternative UK | phoney |
| Noun | |
| plural | phonies |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | phonies |
| present participle | phonying |
| past participle | phonied |
| past | phonied |
Origin of phony
Of unknown origin. Perhaps an alteration of fawny (“gilt brass ring used by swindlers”) (1781), from Irish fáinne (“ring”).
Words formed from phony
Words that rhyme with phony
38 more rhymesFewer rhymes
Questions about phony
- What does phony mean?
- Phony means fraudulent; fake; having a misleading appearance.
- What is phony in Hindi?
- Phony in Hindi is कपटी (kapṭī). See Phony meaning in Hindi.
- What part of speech is phony?
- Phony can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce phony?
- Phony is pronounced /ˈfoʊni/ (US).
Words near phony in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: phony (page history and authors); phony (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); phony (Nepali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-phoney.ogg.
Cite this entry: “phony.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/phony. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.