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hoax

verbnounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//həʊks//
  • United States//hoʊks//

To deceive (someone) by making them believe something that has been maliciously or mischievously fabricated.

verb

  1. 1

    To deceive (someone) by making them believe something that has been maliciously or mischievously fabricated.

Etymology

Reportedly a form of hocus. Possibly from hocus-pocus or Latin iocus (“joke”). Compare hokey.

noun

  1. 1

    Anything deliberately intended to deceive or trick.

    The phone call to the police about a tiger in a tree turned out to be a hoax.

    The news story about the pop singer coming to town, unfortunately for his fans, turned out to be a hoax.

Forms

plural
hoaxes
past tense
hoaxed
past participle
hoaxed
present participle
hoaxing
third person singular
hoaxes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).