lavish or plentiful in imagination only; illusory; sham
a Barmecide feast
Word origin
C18: from the name of a prince in The Arabian Nights who served empty plates to beggars, alleging that they held sumptuous food
Barmecide in American English
(ˈbɑːrməˌsaid)
noun
1.
a member of a noble Persian family of Baghdad who, according to a tale in The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, gave a beggar a pretended feast with empty dishes
adjective
2.
giving only the illusion of plenty; Barmecidal
Word origin
[‹ Pers Barmekī family name, lit., offspring of Barmek, with -ide-id1 for Pers -ī ‹ Ar]-id is a suffix of nouns that have the general sense “offspring of, descendant of,” occurringoriginally in loanwords from Greek (Atreid; Nereid), and productive in English on the Greek model, esp. in names of dynasties, withthe dynasty’s founder as the base noun (Abbasid; Attalid), and in names of periodic meteor showers, with the base noun usually denoting theconstellation or other celestial object in which the shower appears (Perseid)