(a.) Doubtful or not settled in opinion; being in doubt; wavering or fluctuating; undetermined.
(a.) Occasioning doubt; not clear, or obvious; equivocal; questionable; doubtful; as, a dubious answer.
(a.) Of uncertain event or issue; as, in dubious battle.
Example Sentences:
(1) It’s impossible to automate fully the process of separating truth from falsehood, and it’s dubious to cede such control to for-profit media giants.
(2) The draw was enough to take England to the finals in Japan, where Beckham exorcised the demons of four years earlier by scoring the only goal (a dubiously awarded penalty) in the defeat of Argentina.
(3) But Blair's address - "history will forgive us" - was a dubious exercise in group therapy: the cheers smacked of pathetic gratitude, as he piously pardoned the legislators, as well as himself, for the catastrophe of Iraq.
(4) I drive past buildings that I know, or assume, to house bedsits, their stucco peeling like eczema, their window frames rattling like old bones, and I cannot help myself from picturing the scene within: a dubious pot on an equally dubious single ring, the female in charge of it half-heartedly stirring its contents at the same time as she files her nails, reads an old Vogue, or chats to some distant parent on the telephone.
(5) A dubious pattern is emerging of donations through front companies.
(6) The relationship of this metabolic aberration to the production of headache still remains dubious for various reasons.
(7) During his stints in the Bush and Obama administration Comey has continually taken authoritarian and factually dubious public stances both at odds with responsible public policy and sometimes the law.
(8) Today the overestimation of human understanding is reflected in a dogmatic adherence to specific professional or idealogically biased doctrines and in the dubious ideal of a purely empirical science with its limited applicability to mankind.
(9) It seems clear that even as we buy cheap clothes with dubious provenance, from an ethical standpoint, people want to do better.
(10) Their mechanism is dubious: swelling of mitochondria and intracellular lipidosis, which could signify cellular hypoxia, are rarely present.
(11) Imprecise definitions of these complications of necrotizing pancreatitis make inter-institutional comparisons of previously identified data dubious.
(12) Critics say this is part of a broader, dubious attempt to appease the Kremlin and boost bilateral trade.
(13) In his attempt to justify the unjustifiable, Mr Grieve has clutched at a fragile constitutional doctrine and adopted a deeply dubious legal course.
(14) Exporting what appear to be educational success stories is a dubious enterprise, because it is so easy to misread how another country's system works and to discount its cultural background.
(15) Observed retrospectively, in some cases death was the result of dubious indication.
(16) The Guardian’s own readers’ anthology of dubious deals – crusty rolls 40p, two for £1!
(17) Sensitivity (dubious + positive, after exclusion of inadequates) was 0.83 and dependent on histologic type (infiltrating = 0.87, intraductal = 0.68).
(18) The vice-president even made repeated trips to CIA headquarters in Langley to bully analysts into producing more hawkish reports, while Rumsfeld’s Pentagon sucked up highly dubious “evidence” from Iraqi exiles and ideological freelancers.
(19) This becomes very dubious when they are more numerous.
(20) The change in surface tension did not correlate with a change in lung retractive forces or with lung lipid content and was, therefore, of dubious biological significance.
Mountebank
Definition:
(n.) One who mounts a bench or stage in the market or other public place, boasts of his skill in curing diseases, and vends medicines which he pretends are infalliable remedies; a quack doctor.
(n.) Any boastful or false pretender; a charlatan; a quack.
(v. t.) To cheat by boasting and false pretenses; to gull.
(v. i.) To play the mountebank.
Example Sentences:
(1) This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
(2) He was the first and last ophthalmologist to travel from court to court of Europe with a cavalcade of outriders and supporters; and although he was caricatured as a mountebank, there was an element of genius about him, and his innovations, especially in squint surgery, demand that he should not be forgotten.