The printing and dissemination of spurious news is hardly new, but the term fake news is. However, when we say that an English word is “new,” we are using a broader meaning of that word than if we were to refer to, say, a musical genre. Fake news appears to
have begun seeing general use at the end of the 19th century.
The public taste is not really vitiated and it does not in its desire for ‘news’ absolutely crave for distortions of facts and enlargements of incidents; and it certainly has no genuine appetite for
‘fake news’ and ‘special fiend’ decoctions such as were served up by a local syndicate a year or two ago.
—The Buffalo Commercial (Buffalo, NY), 2 May
1891
One of the reasons that fake news is such a recent addition to our vocabulary is that the word fake is also fairly young. Fake was little used as an adjective prior to the late 18th century. But we obviously had fake news before the 1890s, so what did we call it? There was doubtless a wide range of expressions that people have resorted to when they felt the need to indicate that the newspapers had been fibbing, but one of the most common ones was false news. We can see this collocation in use as far back as the 16th century.
The French press knows little, and under laws which punish "false news," and render a journal liable to suppression if it displeases the executive power, is naturally afraid to say what little it knows.
—The Detroit Free Press, 20 Sept. 1866
So now we know that fake news has been in use for over a century, has increasingly widespread use, and has a consistent meaning: does this mean that it is a word we are watching? Er…not really.
The reason fake news is unlikely to be entered in our dictionary anytime soon is that it is a self-explanatory compound noun — a combination of two distinct words, both well known, which when used in combination yield an easily understood meaning. Fake news is, quite simply, news (“material reported in a newspaper or news periodical or on a newscast”) that is fake (“false, counterfeit”).
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Originally Posted by TheCount
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