apocryphal
/əˈpɒkrɪf(ə)l
/adjective
1(Of a story or statement) of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true: an apocryphal story about a former president his alleged description of opera as ‘fat gits singing’ is probably apocryphal...
- Urban legends are apocryphal or wildly inaccurate stories that are passed on from person to person until they reach a point where they are accepted as truth.
- Other stories that sound apocryphal are unfortunately true.
- I have no idea whether or not the above story is true or apocryphal, but I'd like to believe it anyway.
Synonyms
fictitious, made-up, untrue, fabricated, false, spurious;
imaginary, mythical, legendary;
dubious, doubtful, debatable, questionable, unverified, unauthenticated, unsubstantiated, unsupported
1.1Of or belonging to the Apocrypha: the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas...
- Even highly exalted men, like the authors of apocryphal books, Daniel, for instance, and Enoch, committed, to aid their cause, and without the shadow of a scruple, acts which we should call frauds.
- None of this of course is in the New Testament, although once again some elements of these stories can be found in what we call the apocryphal New Testament, later Christian writings.
- These include biblical, apocryphal, sectarian, and legal writings.
Derivatives
apocryphally
- Time to announce the year's top 10 headlines which may, apocryphally, have appeared in the Irish Times.
- There was famously, possibly apocryphally, a public school classics master who took early retirement to go and become a Masai wife.
- In 1604 he demonstrated that unequal weights drop with equal velocity, an observation apocryphally said to be based on the dropping of weights from the leaning Tower of Pisa.