phoney
adjective, noun, verb
phoney is an adjective meaning “Alternative form of phony” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled P-H-O-N-E-Y and has 2 syllables, and it appears about once in every 2 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).
What does phoney mean?
adjective
- 1
UKAlternative form of phony.
noun
- 1
Alternative form of phony.
verb
- 1
Alternative form of phony.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce phoney?
- US
Phoney has 2 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-phoney.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of phoney
- phonier comparative
- phoniest superlative
- phoneys plural, present, singular, he/she/it
- phonies plural
- phoneying participle, present
- phoneyed participle, past
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is phoney?
Phoney appears about once in every 2 million words in written English, the 42,145th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Words people confuse with phoney
Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).
Also written: phony.
Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).