- impostor
- impostor, faker, quack, mountebank, charlatan denote a person who makes pretensions to being someone or something that he is not or of being able to do something he cannot really do.Impostor applies especially to one who passes himself off for someone else{
there is an impostor abroad, who takes upon him the name of this young gentleman, and would willingly pass for him— Addison
}However the word often serves as a general term for anyone who assumes a title, character, or profession that is not his own{charged that Kim II Sung was an impostor trading on the name of a legendary Korean resistance leader— Time
}Faker applies to one who gives himself the appearance of being what, in character or in profession, he is not{the accused man is not insane, he is merely a clever faker
}{a hypocrite is a moral or religious faker
}{he is essentially a faker with a large contempt for the ignorance and gullibility of the American voter— Current Histor
}Quack is the popular and con- temptous term for an ignorant, untrained, or unscrupulous practitioner of medicine or law or seller of remedies or treatments, and usually carries a strong implication of fraud or self-delusion{dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also, in great part, of dupes— Carlyle
}{one of the most notorious cancer-cure quacks of the day— JAMA
}Mountebank sometimes suggests quackery, but it regularly suggests cheap and undignified efforts to win attention{political mountebanks
}{our Sabbaths, closed with mummery and buffoon; preaching and pranks will share the motley scene . . . God's worship and the mountebank between— Cowper
}Charlatan applies to a writer, speaker, preacher, professor, or expert who covers his ignorance or lack of skill by pretentious, flashy, or magniloquent display{insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless innovation for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the charlatan— George Eliot
}{replaced by the charlatans and the rogues—by those without learning, without scruples, or both— Asher Moore
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.