Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Made or carried out in good faith; sincere: a bona fide offer.
- adj. Authentic; genuine: a bona fide Rembrandt. See Synonyms at authentic.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. In or with good faith; without fraud or deception; with sincerity; genuinely: frequently used as a compound adjective in the sense of honest; genuine; not make-believe. An act done bona fide, in law, is one done without fraud, or without knowledge or notice of any deceit or impropriety, in contradistinction to an act done deceitfully, with bad faith, fraudulently, or with knowledge of previous facts rendering the act to be set up invalid.
Wiktionary
- adj. Done in good faith.
- adj. Genuine; not counterfeit.
GNU Webster's 1913
- In or with good faith; without fraud or deceit; real or really; actual or actually; genuine or genuinely.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. not counterfeit or copied
- adj. undertaken in good faith
Etymologies
- Latin bonā fidē : bonā, feminine ablative of bonus, good + fidē, ablative of fidēs, faith.
Examples
“A bona fide shrink would probably advise: Miles, you suffer from anorexile envy—one who covets the ability to exile one’s body into foodless bliss.”
“By now, Dante, Tronne, Tater, Bodeem, and I were a bona fide band of brothers.”
“When this heroic and spontaneous ground swell on behalf of freedom refused to recede, Poland’s Communist leaders had been forced to grant Lech Walesa’s Solidarity trade union an inch of freedom, recognizing it as a bona fide representative of the workers, and under more pressure even spoke of introducing a modicum of democratic reform to the Polish Communist Party.”
“In his letter from Allenwood, Rick Ames offered a subtler definition: A double agent may be of two sorts: one who was a bona fide agent of an espionage service but who was turned, tumbled or recruited by another without the first service’s knowledge or one who falsely gains the trust of an espionage service in order to serve another.”
Simon & Schuster: The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time
“Caeterum etiam earum rerum usucapio nobis competit, quae non a domino nobis tradita fuerint, si modo eas bona fide acceperimus Gaius, l ii.”
“Feif, for example, was a wicked athlete and a bona fide badass on the water.”
Beach Road
“If what you are looking for is bona fide qualitative equality of opportunity, to live up to Aycock's idea, to every child there should be reserved "the right to have the opportunity to burgeon out all that there is within him.”
“Pudding' was the code word agreed upon so the boy from Yonkers would know when he was having a bona fide adventure.”
Firestorm
“Also the name of the stolen property’s bona fide owner, who was known to her.”
Trouble Magnet
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘bona fide’.
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Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
Anything said in Latin seems profound.
ex libris, quo signo nata es, carpe diem, da capo al fine, sic transit glori..., carper diem, e pluribus septum, magister mundi sum., me transmitte sur..., radix lecti, noli equi dentes ..., veni, vidi, velcro and 158 more...
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The Latin Doctor is Greek to me
Biology Students, Gladiators, Devil Dogs & Harry Potter
et tu, semper fidelis, carpe diem, cui bono, pons asinorum, limbus, e pluribus unum, sine qua non, quidnunc, lacus oblivionis, quincunx, experimentum crucis and 128 more...
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Pop Latin
Commonly used Latin expressions
viva voce, vide supre, vide, supra, stet, status quo, sine qua non, sine die, sic, quid pro quo, pro rata, pro bono and 24 more...
biocon The plural of "bona fide" (fem. ablative case of a 5th declension noun), which literally means "with good faith," is "bonis fidebus" (cf. bona fides). Dec 4, 2011
sionnach good dog. Jul 14, 2008