Hoax

How to spell hoax

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hoax

What does hoax mean?

1. nounA deliberate deception or fabricated story presented as true, often as a joke or to mislead.
2. verbTo deceive someone with a false story or fabricated event.

Hoax in a sentence

• noun

  The bomb threat turned out to be a cruel hoax that wasted police time.

• verb

  The prankster tried to hoax his colleagues with a fake memo from the boss.

• noun

  The email promising a free holiday was an obvious hoax designed to steal passwords.

• verb

  Scammers hoax vulnerable people into handing over their savings.

Where does hoax come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Hoax first appears in English in the late eighteenth century and is widely thought to be a contraction of 'hocus', the opening word of the mock-Latin conjuring phrase 'hocus-pocus' that travelling magicians chanted while performing tricks. 'Hocus' itself meant to trick or to cheat, so a 'hoax' naturally came to mean a deliberate deception passed off as truth. The 'hocus-pocus' formula is generally taken to be deliberate gibberish in the style of church Latin, possibly a parody of the words 'hoc est corpus' (Latin for 'this is the body') spoken during the Mass. From the idea of fooling an audience with patter and sleight of hand, the shortened form hoax settled into its modern sense of a practical joke or fabricated story meant to deceive. The unusual 'oa' spelling and the final 'x' make it look exotic, but it is really just a compact descendant of a magician's nonsense word.

How the word is built

• hoax (a single root word, probably a shortening of 'hocus' from 'hocus-pocus')