Bologna refers toa type of sausage made of finely ground meat that has been cooked and smoked. Baloney is nonsense.It is an early 20th-century American coinage derived frombologna. It may also be influenced byblarney, which in one of its definitions meansnonsenseordeceptive talk.
Our reference sources differ on whether baloney and bologna are hom*ophones in English. Some say both should be pronounced “baloney,” while others saybologna should be pronounced like the Italian city, Bologna (“boloan-ya”), where the sausage originates. But everyone agrees that the two spellings have different meanings.
Examples
Not only does Main Street not believe it, a good part of Wall Street thinks it’s baloney as well. [CNBC]
Don’t give me this baloney that he applied for his retirement a long time ago. [Tonawanda News]
The meat at Gray’s Papaya tasted like burnt bologna. [NY Times Fifth DownBlog]
It was an uninspiring loaf of French bread and a ring of Oscar Mayer bologna. [Boston Globe]
Baloney is often used in the phrasal adjective phony-baloney (or, in British publications, phoney-baloney)—for example:
As such, they are perfectly suited to the phoney-baloney gimmickry of 3D. [The Guardian]
