Sham

How to spell sham

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sham

What does sham mean?

1. nounSomething deliberately presented as genuine but actually false; a fraud or pretence.
2. adjectiveNot genuine; designed to look real while being false or imitation.
3. verbTo pretend or feign something, especially in order to deceive.

Sham in a sentence

• noun

  The investment turned out to be a complete sham, and dozens of savers lost money.

• adjective

  The salesman handed over a sham guarantee that no court would ever honour.

• verb

  He would often sham illness to avoid the early shift at work.

• noun

  Critics called the public inquiry a sham designed to protect the people responsible.

• adjective

  They staged a sham negotiation while the real decision had already been made.

• verb

  She chose to sham ignorance rather than admit she had read the report.

Where does sham come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Sham first appears in English in the later 1600s, originally as slang. Its most widely accepted source is a northern English regional pronunciation of the word 'shame', so a sham was at first a trick that brought shame on its victim, a hoax or imposture. From the noun for a fraudulent trick it quickly spread into use as an adjective meaning 'false' or 'counterfeit' and a verb meaning 'to pretend'. Because it began as informal cant rather than learned vocabulary, its exact birth is genuinely uncertain, which is why dictionaries hedge the 'shame' connection with words like 'probably'. The short, blunt single-syllable spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over three centuries, and its closeness to 'shame' is a handy memory hook even if the link cannot be proven beyond doubt.

How the word is built

• sham (a single root, probably a northern English dialect variant of 'shame'); no prefix or suffix