Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. anything fake, counterfeit, untrustworthy.

1842		Whip & Satirist of NY & Brooklyn (NY)1 Oct. n.p.: He sports a ‘fummy’ covered with ‘farnies,’ a ‘ticker,’ and a ‘dummy’ filled with queer .
1902		C.L. Cullen More Ex-Tank Tales 99: If youse tinks f’r minnit dat youse is goin’ t’ git away wit’ a phony like dat wit me [etc.].
1908		H. Green Maison De Shine 10: An’ they better not hand you no phoneys neither [...] not while your pop’s ’round to git the stones tested.
1914		Ade ‘The New Fable of the Marathon in the Mud’ in Ade’s Fables 290: Aleck could smell a Phoney before he opened the Envelope, because that is how he got His.
1926		J. Black You Can’t Win (2000) 142: In short, I’m afraid the thing is a rank phoney.
1938		R. Chandler ‘Red Wind’ in Red Wind (1946) 57: They’re good phonies—but they’re phoney.
1949		N. Algren Man with the Golden Arm 149: Frankie unfolded the single just to be sure it wasn’t a phony.
1953		T. Runyon In For Life 82: The name is a phony; the man is not.
1953		‘John Eagle’ Hoodlums (2021) 121: Kirk passed seven phonies [i.e. counterfeit $10 bills] in twenty minutes.
1958		R. Chandler Playback 108: I’m kind of snoopy when I get roped in on a phoney like that one.
1960		C. Cooper Jr Scene (1996) 226: That’s [i.e. an ID card] phony; I bet it’s a phoney.
1971		J. Mandelkau Buttons 85: We knew the charge was a phoney.

2. an insincere, untrustworthy, ‘fake’ person.

1916		S.F. Call and Post 28 Nov. 12: ‘Don’t Mr. Jenks know a lot of people?’ ‘They’re all phonies.’ .
1934		B. Appel Brain Guy (1937) 226: He was a funny guy, damn him. A queer. A phony. A twist.
1937		D. Fuchs Low Company 187: What the hell kind of a phoney are you anyway?
1948		(con. 1944) N. Mailer Naked and Dead 340: Jansen, you’re a phony.
1949		W.R. Burnett Asphalt Jungle in Four Novels (1984) 222: The big phoney. The windbag.
1959		J. Osborne World of Paul Slickey Act II: That phoney!
1968		N. Heard Howard Street 57: The enjoyment of seeing that he wasn’t the real phony after all.
1970		E. Tidyman Shaft 101: You [...] are the biggest goddam phony in the world.
1988		P. Califia Macho Sluts 30: One was too scrawny, one was a phony.
1999		Indep. Traveller 17 July 5: The squares and phonies [...] encountered by Kerouac and Cassidy in 1956.
2001		K. Sampson Outlaws (ms.) 2: Makes you fucking sick sometimes he does, Gerrard. What a fucking phoney, by the way.

3. (gay) a mean or cheap client for a gay prostitute.

1941

G. Legman ‘Lang. of Homosexuality’ Appendix VII in Henry Sex Variants.

4. a male homosexual; a man who pursues underage girls [implies a ‘fake’ man, lacking in ‘masculinity’].

1950

‘Hal Ellson’ Tomboy (1952) 69: There’s an old phony on a bench down the path and he’s going to be taken.