- fictitious
- fictitious, fabulous, legendary, mythical, apocryphal mean having the character of something invented or imagined as opposed to something true or genuine.Fictitious commonly implies fabrication and, therefore, more often suggests artificiality or contrivance than intent to deceive or deliberate falsification{
many authors prefer to assume a fictitious name
}{he was a novelist: his amours and his characters were fictitious— Gogarty
}In an extended sense fictitious definitely connotes falseness when applied to value, worth, or significance and suggests its determination by other than the right standards{the furore created by this incident gives it a fictitious impor- tance
}{in booms and in panics the market value of a security is often fictitious
}Fabulous stresses the mar- velousness or incredibility of what is so described; only at times, however, does the adjective imply a thing's impossibility or nonexistence{the fabulous mill which ground old people young— Dickens
}{the company paid fabulous dividends
}{[Lincoln] grows vaguer and more fabulous as year follows year— Mencken
}Often it is little more than a vague intensive{a house with a. fabulous view of the mountains
}{we had a fabulous vacation trip
}Legendary usually suggests popular tradition and popular susceptibility to elaboration of details or distortion of historical facts as the basis for a thing's fictitious or fabulous character{the legendary deeds of William Tell
}{the Tarquins, legendary kings of ancient Rome
}{Bradford's John Henry . . . took a famous legendary Negro for its hero— Van Doren
}Mythical, like legendary, usually presupposes the working of the popular imagination, but it distinctively implies a purely fanciful explanation of facts or the creation of purely imaginary beings and events especially in accounting for natural phenomena. Therefore, mythical in its wider use is nearly equivalent to imaginary and implies nonexistence{the mythical beings called nymphs
}{these ancestors are not creations of the mythical fancy but were once men of flesh and blood— Frazer
}Apocryphal typically attributes dubiety to the source of something (as a story or account) and especially suggests that the source is other than it is believed or claimed to be{this . . . epigram, has a certain fame in its own right. It too has been attributed to Ariosto, though it is evidently apocryphal— Morby
}{the apocryphal work attributed to Chaucer in the 16th century— Philip Williams
}In such use it does not necessarily imply that the matter is in itself untrue, but it stresses the lack of a known responsible source. Sometimes, however, apocryphal loses its stress on source and then may imply dubiety or inaccuracy of the thing itself{taking to themselves the upper rooms formerly belonging to the apocryphal invisible lodger— Dickens
}{tales, possibly apocryphal and certainly embroidered, of his feats of intelligence work in the eastern Mediterranean— Firth
}Analogous words: invented, created (see INVENT): imaginary, fanciful, fantastic: fabricated, fashioned (see MAKE)Antonyms: historical
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
