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The term factoid can in common usage mean either a false or spurious statement presented as a fact, as well as (according to Merriam Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary) a true, if brief or trivial item of news or information. The term was coined originally in 1973 as a neologism by American writer Norman Mailer to mean a "piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it’s not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print."〔 Paul Dickson April 30, 2014, Time Magazine, (The origins of writerly words ), Retrieved November 14, 2015〕...On occasion, a writer will coin a fine neologism that spreads quickly but then changes meaning. Since its creation in 1973 the term has evolved from its original meaning, in common usage, and has assumed other meanings, particularly being used to describe a brief or trivial item of news or information. So it is a factoid that "factoid" means something that is true. ==Usage== The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' defines factoid as "1. A brief or trivial item of news or information" and "1.1 an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact". The term was coined by American writer Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer described a factoid as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper", and created the word by combining the word ''fact'' and the ending ''-oid'' to mean "similar but not the same". The ''Washington Times'' described Mailer's new word as referring to "something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact". Accordingly, factoids may give rise to, or arise from, common misconceptions and urban legends. Several decades after the term was coined by Mailer, it grew to have several meanings, some of which are quite different from each other. In 1993, William Safire identified several contrasting senses of ''factoid'': # factoid: accusatory: "misinformation purporting to be factual; or, a phony statistic."〔 # factoid: neutral: "seemingly though not necessarily factual"〔 # factoid: (the CNN version): "a little-known bit of information; trivial but interesting data."〔 This new sense of ''factoid'' as a trivial but interesting fact was popularized by the CNN Headline News TV channel, which, during the 1980s and 1990s, often included such a fact under the heading ''factoid'' during newscasts. BBC Radio 2 presenter Steve Wright uses factoids extensively on his show. Occasionally, these can be incorrect, such as when he defined a Googol as the number 1 followed by ''one million'' zeroes in September 2012, when the correct definition is the number 1 followed by ''one hundred'' zeroes. Historian Dion Smythe defines factoids to be assertions about the truth, as documented in primary sources of historical research. In this indirect meaning, the truthfulness of factoids comes from objectively observable existence of such assertions themselves, and not from the truthfulness of what they claim about the world. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Factoid」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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