adjective

• 1Not real or true, being imaginary or having been fabricated.

  ‘she pleaded guilty to stealing thousands in taxpayer dollars by having a fictitious employee on her payroll’

  More example sentences

  • ‘This must be a real, not a fictitious, intention, so it hardly arises in the case of a fraudster.’
  • ‘Ms Moore, the department and Downing Street issued blanket denials, claiming the e-mail was fabricated and fictitious.’
  • ‘Better to discover how science is in fact developed and learned than to fabricate a fictitious structure to a similar effect.’
  • ‘Grossly overvalued shares in these companies provided a fictitious tax base from employee stock options and capital gains.’
  • ‘Claims of working for the fictitious water board allowed bogus callers to steal from the home of an elderly Chelmsford resident.’
  • ‘Getting thrown out of it, preferably after signing in under a fictitious and assumed name, was always a local rite of passage.’
  • ‘She used four fictitious names on bogus loan applications to her company and pocketed the proceeds.’
  • ‘We made some phone calls to our people in the north, and they all confirmed that this is a true story and it's not a fictitious story.’
  • ‘We do not use pretentious, fictitious terms for my establishment's beverages.’
  • ‘In the last year, management tried to conceal the looming bankruptcy by the fictitious sale of the bank's real estate subsidiary.’
  • ‘Respondents were asked to indicate which items were indeed the titles of real children's books as opposed to fictitious titles.’
  • ‘However, when used for purposes of assessing taxes, fictitious values do indeed become real ones.’
  • ‘Never cheat by inventing a fictitious cab driver with whom you argue.’
  • ‘Halfbakery is a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users.’
  • ‘After all, by inventing a fictitious past, success in overcoming it would seem to be guaranteed.’
  • ‘Each group not only had to design the game, but invent a fictitious company, and determine their roles within it.’
  • ‘Murphy was a fictitious freelancer Reynolds invented to extract some extra cash from the Irish Press.’
  • ‘It is believed by historians of mathematics that this is entirely fictitious and was merely invented by the authors.’
  • ‘The company had sold funds for largely fictitious assets and had hired an actress to deliver a false audit report for investors.’
  • ‘A new series of posters is making its appearance on the university campus, featuring fictitious sufferers of psychoses.’

  Synonyms

  false, fake, counterfeit, fabricated, sham

  View synonyms

  1. 1.1Relating to or denoting the imaginary characters and events found in fiction.
     ‘the people in this novel are fictitious; the background of public events is not’
     More example sentences

     • ‘The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on fictitious characters in a mythical village.’
     • ‘It is about a West Coast Rugby team full of larger than life fictitious characters.’
     • ‘For the first time, the Indian Postal Services Department has issued a stamp on a fictitious character.’
     • ‘This character could be fictitious and yet the story would have had the same powerful message.’
     • ‘Spearman is a fictitious character, the hero of a series of murder mysteries written by Marshall Jevons.’
     • ‘Even though the character is completely fictitious, it always retains some of the qualities of the player.’
     • ‘Since this is a fictitious character, the authors depict him as they please.’
     • ‘Our entirely fictitious character begins his work day, as many of us do, by opening his email client and checking for new messages.’
     • ‘Memorials are built for great human beings and not for fictitious characters.’
     • ‘It is about a West Coast Rugby team full of larger than life fictitious characters.’
     • ‘I fused them into this fictitious character and improvised things about a second marriage my mother had.’
     • ‘The process he describes is historical though the characters who bring the process to life are fictitious.’
     • ‘Like the other expansion packs, there's a fictitious near-future story behind Thunder.’
     • ‘The characters from the Dubois Chronicles are fictitious and are of my own creation.’
     • ‘I always think it's kind of neat to take some past historical event and tweak it into a fictitious story.’
     • ‘The actual events and people portrayed in Equivocal Death are entirely fictitious.’
     • ‘It's crucial, nonetheless, to draw the distinction between fictitious creatures and real human beings.’
     • ‘We spend a lot of time in this electronic community, but do we ever stop to think whether this community is real or fictitious?’
     • ‘It is set in a fictitious women's college in a wholly real Oxford, where a poison pen is causing increasing alarm and distress among students and staff.’
     • ‘It's a two-hour fictitious psychological thriller that has real elements to it.’
     Synonyms

     fictional, imaginary, imagined, invented, made up, make-believe, unreal, non-existent, mythical, storybook, apocryphal

     View synonyms