Bogus is an informal word used to describe something that is not real or genuine, making it a synonym of such words as fake, false, and counterfeit.

// We were disappointed to find out that the purses we bought were bogus.

// The company was investigated over several bogus claims that their products could guarantee better health for their customers.

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“A former West Covina resident admitted to selling at least $250,000 in bogus sports and entertainment memorabilia, including forged photos and signatures of the ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ stars.” — Noah Goldberg, The Los Angeles Times, 9 Apr. 2025

In her 1840 novel A New Home—Who’ll Follow?, author Carolina Kirkland wrote about a scandal affecting the fictitious frontier town of Tinkerville, whose bank vaults were discovered to contain “a heavy charge of broken glass and tenpenny nails, covered above and below with half-dollars, principally ‘bogus.’ Alas! for Tinkerville, and alas, for poor Michigan!” Alas indeed. Bogus (an apparent U.S. coinage) was first used in the argot of wildcat banks (like the one in Tinkerville) as a noun referring to counterfeit money. It later branched out into adjective use meaning “counterfeit or forged.” Although the noun is now obsolete, the adjective is still used today with the same meaning, and is applied not only to phony currency but to anything that is less than genuine, making it part of a treasury of similar words ranging from the very old (sham) to the fairly new (fugazi).