adj. (orig. American: now common).—Spurious; fictitious; sham; not what it professes to be. [MURRAY, who, while slily satirising the ‘bogus derivations circumstantially given,’ says: ‘Dr. S. Willard, of Chicago, in a letter to the editor of this Dictionary, quotes from the Painesville (Ohio) Telegraph of July 6 and Nov. 2, 1827, the word BOGUS as a subs., applied to an apparatus for coining false money. Mr. Eber. D. Howe, who was then editor of that paper, describes in his Autobiography (1878) the discovery of such a piece of mechanism in the hands of a gang of coiners at Painesville in May, 1827; it was a mysterious looking object, and some one in the crowd styled it a BOGUS, a designation adopted in the succeeding numbers of the paper. Dr. Willard considers this to have been short for tantrabogus, a word familiar to him from his childhood, and which in his father’s time was commonly applied in Vermont to any ill-looking object; he points out that tantrabogus is given in HALLIWELL as a Devonshire word for the devil.’
BOGUS seems thus to be related to bogy, etc.].
1825. HUGHES, in J. Ludlow’s History of the United States, 338. This precious house of representatives—the BOGUS legislature, as it was at once called.
1855. W. NORTH, The Slave of the Lamp, 33. ‘Examine those bills, keep those which are good, return me the bad.’… ‘I guess the whole pile are BOGUS,’ muttered Confidence Bob, as he turned over his roll.
18[?]. Boston Atlas [BARTLETT]. Not one cent should be given to pay the members of the BOGUS legislature of Kansas, or for the support of the BOGUS laws passed by them.
18[?]. New York Herald [BARTLETT]. The Know Nothings of Massachusetts must behave themselves better than they did in their visit to the Catholic nunnery, or they will be repudiated by their brethren in other States, as BOGUS members of the order.
1857. American Notes and Queries, July. The wide-awake citizens of Boston have been sadly bitten by a BOGUS issue of the old ‘Pine-Tree Shilling currency,’ got up by a smart Gothamite.
1862. New York Herald, 2 May, ‘Washington Letter.’ I and my assistants [in Tennessee] are loyal to the United States; that when this office came under the rebel government, and the oath was sent to us, we filed it BOGOUSLY [sic], and sent it to Richmond without swearing to it.
1869. S. L. CLEMENS (‘Mark Twain’), The Innocents at Home, xvii. Nobody had ever received his BOGUS history as gospel before; its genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks; but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful for the dose.
1874. M. and F. COLLINS, Frances, xxxv. ‘They’ve got some good money, as well as BOGUS notes.’
1883. The Saturday Review, March 31, 399, 2. M. Soleirol had probably a number of forged autographs of Molière; his whole collection was a BOGUS assortment of frauds.
