The word truthiness was first brought into the public eye in October 2005 by US comedian Stephen Colbert, who featured the term in his satirical news commentary programme The Colbert Report. Though Colbert exploited the non-intellectual, ‘made-up’ character of truthiness for humorous effect, the word was not his own invention and in fact dates back as far as the 1800s. The Oxford English Dictionary contains an entry for the adjective truthy, which is defined as ‘characterized by the truth’ and includes the derivation truthiness. Truthy and truthiness were originally used as straightforward variants of truthful and truthfulness. Though Colbert can’t be credited with inventing the word, he is certainly responsible for re-introducing truthiness and truthy into 21st-century English, giving them a new, ironic meaning.