Today's word is bogus, spelled B-O-G-U-S.
Bogus is an adjective.
It's an informal word used to describe something that is not real or genuine,
making it a synonym of such words as fake, false, and counterfeit.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the L.A.
Times by Noah Goldberg.
In her 1840 novel, A New Home Who'll Follow,
author Carolina Kirkland wrote about a scandal affecting the fictitious frontier town of Tinkerville,
whose bank vaults were discovered to contain a heavy charge of broken glass and ten-penny nails,
covered above and below with half-dollars, principally bogus.
Alas for Tinkerville, and alas for poor Michigan.
Alas, indeed.
The word bogus, an apparent American coinage, was first used in the argo of wildcat banks,
like the one in Tinkerville, as a noun referring to counterfeit money.
It later branched out into adjective use, meaning counterfeit or forged.
Although the noun is now obsolete,
the adjective is still used today with the same meaning,
and is applied not only to phony currency,
but to anything that is less than genuine, making it part of a treasury of similar words,
ranging from the very old, like sham, to the fairly new, like fugazi.