Other forms: faked, faking, fakes
Fake means made to look real in order to deceive. A fake passport, fake jewellery, fake news. It is the plain everyday word.
As a noun a fake is the object itself — the painting is a fake — and as a verb, to fake is to produce something false or to pretend: fake a signature, fake an injury. The pairs are worth separating: counterfeit is used of money and branded goods, forged of documents and signatures, artificial of materials, and imitation of substitutes that are not pretending. Fake is the only one of them you would use in conversation.
1adjectivefakeMade to look real in order to deceive.
“The whole box was fake and sold as genuine.”
synonyms: false, counterfeit, bogus
2noundeceiveSomething made to deceive.
“Three of the paintings turned out to be fakes.”
3verbfalseTo make something false, or to pretend.
“He faked an illness and was found out in a day.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
fake is something false.
Also accepted in games: false, counterfeit
Fake appears in eighteenth-century English thieves' cant with no clear ancestry, possibly from a German word meaning to sweep up or polish. It is one of the few common English words whose origin is genuinely unknown, which is oddly appropriate.
Proto-West Germanic
*fegōn — to clean up, polish
Old Saxon
fegōn
Middle Low German
vēgen
German Low German
fegen
English, today
fake
Built from
From feak. The origin is unknown with certainty, although first attested in 1775 in British criminals' slang. It is probably from feak, feague (“to give a better appearance through artificial means, spruce up, embellish”), itself from German Low German fegen, from Middle Low German vēgen, from Old Saxon fegōn, from Proto-West Germanic fegōn (“to clean up, polish”). Akin to Dutch veeg (“a swipe”), vegen (“to sweep, wipe”); German fegen (“to sweep, to polish”). Compare also Old English fācn (“deceit, fraud”). Perhaps related also to Old Norse fjúka (“to fade, vanquish, disappear”), feikn (“strange, scary, unnatural”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA