Word of the Day

: April 3, 2009

feign

verb FAYN

What It Means

1 : to give a false appearance of : induce as a false impression

2 : to assert as if true : pretend

feign in Context

Shortly after her mom told her that she would have to go to the doctor's, Kim confessed that she was only feigning illness because she forgot to study for a midterm.

Did You Know?

"Feign" is all about faking it, but that hasn't always been so. In one of its earliest senses, "feign" meant "to fashion, form, or shape." That meaning is true to the term's Latin ancestor: the verb "fingere," which also means "to shape." The current senses of "feign" still retain the essence of the Latin source, since to feign something, such as surprise or an illness, requires one to fashion an impression or shape an image. Several other English words that trace to the same ancestor refer to things that are shaped with either the hands, as in "figure" and "effigy," or the imagination, as in "fiction" and "figment."