spoof
Part of speech: noun
adj
verb
Morphological type: simple
Topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
Etymology: Coined by the English comedian Arthur Roberts (1852–1933) in 1884 as the name of a card game involving deception and nonsense.
Inflected forms:
form: spoofs
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: spoofs
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: spoofing
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: spoofed
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: spoofed
pos: verb
tags: past
Senses:
gloss: An act of deception; a hoax; a joking prank.
pos: noun
tags: countable
examples: “Rahther, I say. But you understand, of course, that I’m giving him a bit of spoof.” / “A bit of what?” / “Spoof—spoof. Is it possible that you have been here since Saturday without learning what ‘spoof’ means? It means to chaff, to joke. In the States the slang equivalent would be ‘to string’ someone.” / “How did you learn it?” / “A cabby told me about it. I started to have some fun with him, and he told me to ‘give over on the spoof.’[…]”
gloss: An act of deception; a hoax; a joking prank.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
examples: Don't click anything on that website! That whole site is a spoof! Call IT right now.
gloss: A light parody.
pos: noun
tags: countable
examples: On Broadway, where it opened in 1949, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a spoof of the madcap Twenties which gave Carol Channing her first starring role; on the screen, it was an up-to-date spoof of sex which gave Marilyn Monroe her first starring role in a musical.
The final piece of the country puzzle is found at the corner of Brisbane Street and Kable Avenue, where the Hands of Fame cornerstone bears the palm-prints of more country greats. A glorious spoof, the Noses of Fame memorial, can be savoured over a beer at the Tattersalls Hotel on Peel Street.
gloss: A drinking game in which players hold up to three (or another specified number of) coins hidden in a fist and attempt to guess the total number of coins held.
pos: noun
tags: UK
countable
historical
examples: The British journalist and author Richard Boston supplies an illustrative example of a drinking game once commonly played in British public houses but which has since faded from use: The game Spoof involves three or more players concealing between zero and three coins or similar small objects in a clenched fist that they hold in front of their body or place on the bar counter or table. Players are then prompted to correctly guess the total number of coins held by all players. As the game progresses, correct guesses allow players to drop out until the final round, in which the "loser," determined by making an incorrect guess, is punished by being required to buy the next round of drinks.
gloss: Nonsense.
pos: noun
tags: uncountable
examples: I think you used the expression that you came out because people at home were not aware whether it was "spoof" or whether it really could be carried into effect?—A large number of people at home thought it was "spoof."
gloss: Fake, hoax.
pos: adj
tags: not-comparable
examples: His most recent art project, 'Consuming Desire', explored men's relationship with pornography, using invisible art strategies (a spoof sex shop and a spoof porn CD-ROM), media interventions (TV/radio and press exposure), and therapeutic work with men addicted to pornography.
Despite appearances, Hajime Furukawa's wacky I Don't Like Friday was never aimed at children, but ran as a spoof sex-education English course in Business Jump.
gloss: To gently satirize.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Her [Jean Harlow's] best film is generally considered to be Bombshell (1933), in which she spoofed her own career as a Hollywood sex goddess.
[T]he ensemble [of From A to Z] included […] Elliott Reid spoofing television coverage of a political convention, Kelly Brown trying out another of those nostalgic soft-shoe numbers, and so on. The first-act finale observed a venerable revue tradition by spoofing a current hit show; From A to Z chose The Sound of Music.
According to the audio commentary on "Treehouse Of Horror III," some of the creative folks at The Simpsons were concerned that the "Treehouse of Horror" franchise had outworn its welcome and was rapidly running out of classic horror or science-fiction fodder to spoof.
The resulting conception of the Gulf region as a series of local destinations, as opposed to being an integrated maritime space unified by a body of water, is so pervasive that when Mississippi state legislator Steve Holland proposed renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America in an effort to spoof his anti-immigration colleagues the joke was lost on the national media (Wilkinson 2012).
gloss: To deceive.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Bandy is a few miles from Duffersville—how many I won't say, because when, on local information, I told Ebsworth three and he walked it, he declared he had been deliberately spoofed, and went about vowing reprisals.
Amidst surroundings thus happily suggesting the idyllic and pastoral associations of Arcady, is an unpretending booth, the placards on which announce it to be the temporary resting-place of the "Far-famed Adepts of Thibet," who are there for a much-needed change, after a "3500 years' residence in the Desert of Gobi." There is also a solemn warning that "it is impossible to spoof a Mahatma."
gloss: To falsify; especially, to falsify identities by impersonating for scamming purposes.
pos: verb
tags: ambitransitive
examples: The fraudsters convincingly spoofed a Microsoft webpage and then invited their victims to click various links found there.
However, MULTOPS assumes that packet rates between two hosts are proportional and the IP addresses are not spoofed.
[I]dentities in the online world can be easily spoofed. Your ten-year-old daughter will know that a middle-aged man is not her age or gender when she sees him in the physical world. But as we have seen, that middle-aged man can easily pass himself off as another ten-year-old girl in the online world.
This attack [session hijacking] uses the fact that most communications are protected at session setup but not thereafter. The attacker spoofs the victim's IP address and performs a DoS [denial-of-service] attack on the victim.
For the U.S. and its allies, finding new ways to navigate is crucial. In the Ukraine war, Russia is jamming and spoofing—blocking and faking signals [respectively]—so frequently that satellite navigation isn’t dependable. Other potential adversaries, including China and North Korea, possess similar capabilities. GPS spoofing by militaries has become a civilian hazard as well, presenting a risk to commercial aircraft. “This problem hasn’t been as urgent until right now, when we are seeing the end of reliable GPS,” said Russell Anderson, a principal scientist at Q-CTRL, the Australian startup that ran the test flight. “It is the arms race of the current day, in terms of navigation.”
Derived words: antispoof
spoofable
spoofball
spoofer
spoofery
spoofing
spoofish
unspoofable
Translations:
lang: Bulgarian
word: измама
roman: izmama
lang: Dutch
word: grap
lang: Dutch
word: mystificatie
lang: Dutch
word: bedotterij
lang: Finnish
word: huijaus
lang: Finnish
word: petkutus
lang: French
word: duperie
lang: French
word: farce
lang: Portuguese
word: persuasão
lang: Russian
word: обман
roman: obman
lang: Spanish
word: engaño