apocryphally


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Related to apocryphally: Apocryphal gospels

a·poc·ry·phal

 (ə-pŏk′rə-fəl)
adj.
1. Of questionable authorship or authenticity.
2. Erroneous; fictitious: "Wildly apocryphal rumors about starvation in Petrograd ... raced through Russia's trenches" (W. Bruce Lincoln).
3. Apocryphal Bible Of or having to do with the Apocrypha.

a·poc′ry·phal·ly adv.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
The Garry species only grows between Northern California and southern British Columbia and, so the story goes, was prized by Native Americans, who (perhaps apocryphally) hunted the deer attracted to its dropped acorns.
Freezers take up space and have relatively limited capacities; they require a basically uninterrupted electricity supply to operate (and if they are at much density, likely for building HVAC capacity to handle the waste heat generated); compressors do fail, sometimes with little warning (apocryphally, most likely on a Friday evening on a long weekend); and even with perfect record keeping telling you which shelf, case, box, and slot number to find your wanted sample, there's an at least even chance that it's in an obscure, inconvenient back corner of somewhere and hard to get at.
Like so many of Kubrick's films, 2001: A Space Odyssey was divisive upon release: older audiences, critics and studio heads ('That's the end of Stanley Kubrick,' one apocryphally said (9)) were turned off by its ponderous tone, philosophical ambition and emotional sterility.
Early 20th-century bank robber Willie Sutton apocryphally said he robbed banks because that's where the money was.
At bottom, the former CJ faces the same question that was apocryphally thrown by the apostle Peter to Jesus: Quo vadis, Meilou?
The modern version of this statement is a line attributed, probably apocryphally, to Benjamin Franklin: "Tell me and I forget.
As nineteenth-century American author, paddler, and political philosopher Henry David Thoreau, once (perhaps apocryphally) said, "Everyone believes in something.
Apocryphally at least, when Delany was canned, the Diana Prince era canceled, it was not because readers complained but because Steinem did.
I stared at her, trying to remember to gaze the way you look at someone you're in love with, which is a trick a friend of mine attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to Sofia Coppola.
Asked for his role models, he cites Clement Attlee, whom the much more flamboyant Winston Churchill famously (and perhaps apocryphally) called "a sheep in sheep's clothing" and "a modest man with much to be modest about" -- but Attlee also defeated Churchill in 1945, then laid the foundations for the modern Labour Party (and modern Britain) by establishing the welfare state during his first term in office.