to pass off
18
6.9
- phrasal verb
- /pæs ɔf/
:
hacer pasar por
- No, they're like college students cobbling together known essays, passing it off as their own.
And Greensill then made an unsecured loan to them, which was passed off as supply chain financing.
- And Greensill then made an unsecured loan to them, which was passed off as supply chain financing.
- I I think Joseph Wu is a great example of this, who I don't have pictures of his work but he doesn't try to pass them off as single sheet origami.
Examples
-
The solution is for you to stop trying to pass off garbage as science.
Blog text (23) -
CNN, on the other hand, is trying to pass itself off as an objective news organization.
Blog text (3) -
It's going to be difficult enough to pass you off as my assistant.
Fiction book (1998) -
Are you going to pass that off as a joke?
Fiction book (1997) -
Any real Korean would laugh at my mother's attempt to pass me off as one of them.
Fiction book (2000) -
Andy tried to pass off this bracelet he got for my birthday as real gold.
-
And there are still people who try to pass off smoked Alaskan salmon as nova.
Blog text (11) -
It's impressive, but you can't seriously expect to pass this off as an alien artifact!
Fiction book (1999) -
Said often seeks to pass off sweeping and groundless assertions as historical fact.
Academic text (2008) -
The con artist managed to pass off a fake painting as an original masterpiece.
Synonyms
∞
2.3
To act as if something is true when it is not
172
6.1
To pretend to be someone you are not to trick people
70
7.2
Pretend to be another person by copying their looks, voice or actions
69
8.0
To claim to be or do something, often without proof
27
6.0
To pretend or claim something is true when it is not
26
6.9
To pretend to be someone else to hide the truth
3
6.0
Pretend to be a person or website online to trick people
1
6.4
To pretend to be or feel something to trick people
1
9.4
Sell fake or bad things by tricking someone
To trick someone into buying a fake or unwanted thing
To make something look better than it is to trick people
Antonyms
How Convincing
Surface Forms
Morphology
pass + off
The particle verb 'pass off' conveys a sense of moving something 'off' or away from importance, which gives learners a partial clue from the constituents ('pass' = move/transfer, 'off' = away). However, the specific pragmatic sense of treating something as unimportant or presenting it falsely is idiomatic and not fully predictable from the literal meanings, so a B1 learner who only knows the base words may not reliably infer the exact meaning.
Etymology
Pass off comes from the image of handing something to someone and pretending it is real—like selling a fake painting as an original. So to pass something off means 'to make someone accept something as something it is not'.