[A cant word of U.S., about the origin of which many guesses have been made, and ‘bogus’ derivations circumstantially given.
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 sb. 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 tantarabobs is given in Halliwell as a Devonshire word for the devil. BOGUS seems thus to be related to BOGY, etc.]
† 1. sb. An apparatus for counterfeit coining. Obs.
1827. Painesville Tel. (Ohio), 6 July. That he never procured the casting of a Bogus at one of our furnaces. Ibid., 2 Nov. The eight or ten boguses which have been for some time in operation.
2. adj. Counterfeit, spurious, fictitious, sham: ‘originally applied to counterfeit coin’ (Webster).
1852. Hughes, in J. Ludlow, Hist. U. S., 338. This precious house of representatives—the bogus legislature, as it was at once called.
1857. Boston Daily Courier, 12 June. The learned Judge took occasion to manifest his abhorrence of the use of slang phrases … by saying that he did not know the meaning of ‘bogus transactions.’
1866. Cornh. Mag., Nov., 582. A mere juggle, or as Americans would say, a ‘bogus’ parliament.
1874. M. Collins, Frances, III. 80. They’ve got some good money, as well as bogus notes.
1877. R. Giffen, Stock Exch. Securities, 65. A bogus Company … instead of paying dividends to its Shareholders, goes into Liquidation.
1878. Black, Green Past., xxv. 202. I am not going to spend a penny in a bogus contest.
