Definitions for bogusˈboʊ gəs

Random House Webster's College Dictionary

bo•gusˈboʊ gəs(adj.)

not genuine; counterfeit; phony.

Origin of bogus:

1825–30, Amer.; orig. an apparatus for coining false money; perh. akin to bogy1

Princeton's WordNet

bogus, fake, phony, phoney, bastard(adj)
fraudulent; having a misleading appearance

Kernerman English Learner's Dictionary

bogus(adjective)ˈboʊ gəs
≠genuine
a bogus claim; bogus emails

Wiktionary

bogus(Adjective)
Counterfeit or fake; not genuine.
bogus crimes
bogus(Adjective)
Undesirable or harmful.
bogus(Adjective)
Incorrect, useless, or broken.
bogus(Adjective)
Of a totally fictitious issue printed for collectors, often issued on behalf of a non-existent territory or country (not to be confused with forgery, which is an illegitimate copy of a genuine stamp).
bogus(Adjective)
Based on false or misleading information or unjustified assumptions.
bogus laws

Origin: First attested from 1797, as underworld term for counterfeit coins. Meaning of the machine (known as a bogus press) was first attested 1828. Sense of phony paper money as well as a general adjective applied to anything, being less valuable than it first appeared was first attested 1848. Later, the word was applied to anything of poor quality. The current use to mean useless is probably from the slang of computer hackers.

Webster Dictionary

Bogus(adj)
spurious; fictitious; sham; -- a cant term originally applied to counterfeit coin, and hence denoting anything counterfeit
Bogus(noun)
a liquor made of rum and molasses

The New Hacker's Dictionary

bogus
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.