feign

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The Word of the Day for November 22 is:

feign   \FAYN\   verb 
     1 : to give a false appearance of : induce as a false 
impression  
   *2 : to assert as if true : pretend

Example sentence: 
     "Had Edward been intentionally deceiving her? Had he 
feigned a regard for her which he did not feel?" (Jane Austen, 
_Sense and Sensibility_) 

Did you know? 
     "Feign" is all about faking it, but that hasn't always been 
so. In one of its earliest senses, "feign" meant "to fashion, 
form, or shape." That meaning is true to the term's Latin 
ancestor: the verb "fingere," which also means "to shape." The 
current senses of "feign" still retain the essence of the Latin 
source, since to feign something, such as surprise or an 
illness, requires one to fashion an impression or shape an 
image. Several other English words that trace to the same 
ancestor refer to things that are shaped with either the hands, 
as in "figure" and "effigy," or the imagination, as in "fiction" 
and "figment." 

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.