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Sham   /ʃæm/   Listen
noun
Sham  n.  
1.
That which deceives expectation; any trick, fraud, or device that deludes and disappoints; a make-believe; delusion; imposture; humbug. "A mere sham." "Believe who will the solemn sham, not I."
2.
A false front, or removable ornamental covering.
Pillow sham, a covering to be laid on a pillow.



verb
Sham  v. t.  (past & past part. shammed; pres. part. shamming)  
1.
To trick; to cheat; to deceive or delude with false pretenses. "Fooled and shammed into a conviction."
2.
To obtrude by fraud or imposition. (R.) "We must have a care that we do not... sham fallacies upon the world for current reason."
3.
To assume the manner and character of; to imitate; to ape; to feign.
To sham Abram or To sham Abraham, to feign sickness; to malinger. Hence a malingerer is called, in sailors' cant, Sham Abram, or Sham Abraham.



Sham  v. i.  To make false pretenses; to deceive; to feign; to impose. "Wondering... whether those who lectured him were such fools as they professed to be, or were only shamming."



adjective
Sham  adj.  False; counterfeit; pretended; feigned; unreal; as, a sham fight. "They scorned the sham independence proffered to them by the Athenians."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sham" Quotes from Famous Books



... misunderstand or fail to remember, but it was a cruelty to her. She wanted to touch his chest. She knew exactly how his breast was shapen under the waistcoat, and she wanted to touch it. It maddened her to hear his mechanical voice giving orders about the work. She wanted to break through the sham of it, smash the trivial coating of business which covered him with hardness, get at the man again; but she was afraid, and before she could feel one touch of his warmth he was ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... of man, who is the reflection of God, is like inquiring into the origin of God, the self- 555:18 existent and eternal. Only impotent error would seek to unite Spirit with matter, good with evil, immortality with mortality, and call this 555:21 sham unity man, as if man were the offspring of both Mind and matter, of both Deity and humanity. Crea- tion rests on a spiritual basis. We lose our standard of 555:24 perfection and set aside the proper conception of Deity, when we admit that the perfect is the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... Parade Ground, with its long-drawn arrays of Sepoy chivalry, its grand reviews before the Burra Lard Sahib, (as in domestic Bengalee we designate the Governor-General,) its solemn sham battles, and its welkin-rending regimental bands, by whose brass and sheepskin God saves the Queen twice a day; from Government House, with its historic pride, pomp, and circumstance, and its red tape, its aides-de-camp, and its adjutant-birds, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... enemies of our birds are the so-called "collectors," men who plunder nests and murder their owners in the name of science. Not the genuine ornithologist, for no one is more careful of squandering bird life than he; but the sham ornithologist, the man whose vanity or affectation happens to take an ornithological turn. He is seized with an itching for a collection of eggs and birds because it happens to be the fashion, or because it gives him the air of ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs

... surround our inner culture and our spiritual life, and that an intellectual underworld threatens our time, which demands a no less rigorous fight until its vice is wiped out. The vice of the social underworld gives a sham satisfaction to the human desire for sensual life; the vice of the intellectual underworld gives the same sham fulfilment to the human longing for knowledge and for truth. The infectious germs which it spreads in the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg


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