pinchbeck

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The Word of the Day for September 15 is: 

pinchbeck   \PINCH-beck\   noun
          1 : an alloy of copper and zinc used especially to imitate gold in jewelry
    *2 : something counterfeit or spurious

Example sentence:
     Danny claims that the word "trousers" comes from the name of "inventor" Jacob Trowser, but that etymology is just a pinchbeck.

Did you know?
     On November 27, 1732, an advertisement ran in a British newspaperannouncing that “the toys made of the late ingenious Mr. Pinchbeck's curious metal ... are now sold only by his son….” The Mr. Pinchbeck in question was Christopher Pinchbeck, a London watchmaker who invented the alloy that would be posthumously named for him. Although the metal is used as a substitute for gold, the word “pinchbeck,” which can also be used as an adjective, didn’t acquire its “counterfeit” sense until the 1790s, over 50 years after Pinchbeck’s death. 





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