imposture
/ɪmˈpɒstʃə
/noun
An instance of pretending to be someone else in order to deceive others: I discovered the imposture as soon as her doppelgänger arrived [mass noun]: in a day and a night of violence and imposture William Bentley also succeeds in capturing a smuggler...
- In my previous impostures in the English department, I had picked up some of the rudiments of Romanticism, but one idea that intrigued me was Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime.
- Yet even after he had sold his story to Life magazine, and exposed his strategies, he was unable to resist further impostures.
- When threatened with ‘a very painful experiment’ to uncover any secret, she confessed her imposture on December 7 and was charged as a ‘notorious and vile cheat’.
Synonyms
misrepresentation, pretence, deceit, deception, duping, cheating, trickery, artifice, subterfuge;
hoax, trick, ruse, dodge, blind, wile;
fraudulence, fraud, swindling;
charlatanry, quackery
informal con, con trick, scam, sting, flimflam, kidology
British informal wheeze
Irish informal codology
Origin
Mid 16th century: via French from late Latin impostura, from Latin imposit- 'imposed upon', from the verb imponere (see impose).