Etymology Of unknown origin. Perhaps an alteration of fawny (“gilt brass ring used by swindlers”) (1781), from Irish fáinne (“ring”).
1
Informal 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 International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science; 4), Cambridge: [Cambridge] University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 176:
Etymology Of unknown origin. Perhaps an alteration of fawny (“gilt brass ring used by swindlers”) (1781), from Irish fáinne (“ring”).
1
Informal 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:
2
Informal 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.
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: