As long as there have been people selling things, there have been people cheating, swindling, and otherwise trying to get more money than something’s worth. And of course, words have evolved to describe those things.
In the late 1780s, one such word was fawney, used especially by the Irish to describe brass rings (fainne means “ring”) being sold as gold.
The word stuck, and then got changed in spelling and pronunciation slightly as it was adopted by the greater English-speaking world. Over the course of the next century, the spelling changed to phoney and then phony, and it went from being specifically a fake-ring to being anything fake or not genuine.
By 1902, it shifted from being strictly an adjective–a property of a thing that was fake–to being used as a noun to describe that ingenuine thing or even person.
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.