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spurious

UK/ˈspjʊə.ɹi.əs/US/ˈspjʊɹ.i.əs/
adjectiveC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,035 of 15,258leans written

Spurious means false, though presented as genuine. A spurious claim, spurious accuracy, spurious reasoning.

Spurious accuracy is a useful phrase and means a figure quoted to more decimal places than the measurement can support. In statistics a spurious correlation is two things moving together for no reason at all.

Definitions of spurious

  1. 1adjectivespuriousFalse, though presented as genuine.C2

    “He took the day off on the spurious grounds that his grandmother was ill.”

spurious is a quality.

Where it comes from

Latin spurius means illegitimate or of uncertain fatherhood.

  1. Latin

    spurius — illegitimate, bastardly

  2. English, today

    spurious

Borrowed from Latin spurius (“illegitimate, bastardly”), possibly related to sperno or from ett -.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

spurious in the wild

  • Blench suggests that Chakato may be related to spurious records of the Jorto language.

    Chakato language

  • Agariya is a spurious language said to be spoken by the Agariya people, a community found in northern Chhattisgarh, western Odisha and eastern Madhya Pradesh.

    Agariya language

  • Symphonies No. 2 (attributed to Leopold Mozart) and 3 (written by Carl Friedrich Abel) are spurious.

    List of symphonies by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  • Some symphonies of doubtful authenticity were included in either the Alte Mozart-Ausgabe or the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe; they are in this list but marked as doubtful or spurious.

    List of symphonies by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  • The cantata is definitely by Bach, while the arrangement for organ is regarded by some authorities (from Spitta onwards) as spurious.

    Fugue in G minor, BWV 131a

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.