How to Use apocryphal in a Sentence

apocryphal

adjective

• Then there were the apocryphal stories about the money, ones that ran around the junior staff.
  — Jamie Fewery, Harper’s Magazine , 22 June 2022
• One of the best apocryphal quips from the Cold War was attributed to Henry Kissinger.
  — Jordan Michael Smith, The New Republic, 13 Apr. 2022
• The Viking burial, for example, is apocryphal; the Vikings were known to burn their dead in boats, but kept them parked on land.
  — Lisa Wells, Harper's Magazine, 28 Sep. 2021
• The salaries that make headlines in The Wall Street Journal are somewhere between rare and apocryphal.
  — Paul Tough, The Atlantic, 13 Sep. 2019
• Davis acknowledged that the story could be apocryphal; his source was the grandson of the man in question.
  — Jennifer Ouellette, Wired, 22 Sep. 2019
• The blueberry in a cherry pie, as an apocryphal Texas adage goes.
  — Washington Post, 15 Sep. 2021
• The story of the waffle iron has taken on an apocryphal tone all these years later.
  — Matt Blitz, Popular Mechanics, 15 July 2016
• The Ty Herndon story, the way it's told in Nashville, is almost apocryphal.
  — Jason Sheeler, PEOPLE.com, 17 June 2022
• Strung across one shelf of 3D printers is a black flag, a take on Blackbeard’s (apocryphal) pirate flag.
  — Justin Ling, WIRED, 2 May 2024
• Unlike the apocryphal messenger who ran from Marathon to Athens and then promptly died, Retera was just fine.
  — Ezra Dyer, Car and Driver, 23 Nov. 2020
• The passage was misinterpreted by scholars in the mid-1900s, and over time the apocryphal tale was born.
  — Maya Wei-Haas, Smithsonian, 14 Feb. 2018
• This story may be apocryphal; Baldwin gives us reasons to doubt it.
  — Charlie Tyson, The Atlantic, 18 Oct. 2022
• For better or worse, the Kings of Leon's background seems to have allowed their tales of excess -- the apocryphal and the true -- to come off as less tragic than charming.
  — Andy Langer, Esquire, 28 June 2007
• And then there is the apocryphal nonsense that pads the scripts, as if the facts of Victoria’s life and reign were not sufficient to hold our interest.
  — David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle, 10 Jan. 2018
• How Covid vaccine skeptics came to embrace an apocryphal reading of a 1996 law.
  — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 4 Aug. 2021
• An apocryphal story tells of a despondent man getting on a train.
  — Sandra Dallas, The Denver Post, 13 Apr. 2017
• Phillips named her book for a (probably apocryphal) story about Neel as a young mother.
  — Hillary Kelly, The Atlantic, 8 May 2022
• A possibly apocryphal tale about Nixon's photo op with his turkey claims the bird was so rattled, its feet had to be nailed to the table.
  — Alex Heigl, Peoplemag, 20 Nov. 2023
• There are many versions of an apocryphal tale that explains how the Yucatán Peninsula got its name.
  — Melissa Mohr, The Christian Science Monitor, 12 July 2021
• One anecdote from around the same time, possibly apocryphal, is widely shared.
  — Simon Akam, Bloomberg.com, 23 May 2017
• Is this what Jennifer Aniston dressed that apocryphal Friends salad with every day for 10 years?
  — Hayley Maitland, Vogue, 19 Oct. 2022
• The library’s supporters insist the tale is apocryphal.
  — Gregory S. Schneider, Anchorage Daily News, 26 July 2023
• The picture of a masterly Putin calling every shot is apocryphal.
  — Holman W. Jenkins, WSJ, 13 Mar. 2018
• Over the course of the campaign, Romney has signed on with policies that will make the lives of every single one of these apocryphal people immeasurably worse.
  — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 25 Apr. 2012
• Such narratives are usually apocryphal, or, at the very least, simplified to a fault.
  — Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker, 2 Dec. 2022
• The story is probably apocryphal, but the phrase pairs nicely with the display of the scientist's middle finger.
  — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 17 May 2020
• That quotation is perhaps apocryphal but also contains a large grain of truth.
  — Viviane Callier, Scientific American, 27 Sep. 2023
• Over time, this story, clearly apocryphal in places, has been sanitized.
  — Janna Levin, New York Times, 26 Dec. 2016
• Probably apocryphal, but the point of this cautionary anecdote was that questions of style, wit, or form were less important than the substance of our insight.
  — The New Yorker, 26 June 2024
• Lackey and several others interviewed for the story have an apocryphal theory about why gray has become the go-to floor color for rentals across L.A.: men.
  — Jack Flemming, Los Angeles Times, 9 Aug. 2024

Last Updated: 3 Nov 2024