Question: What is a hoax?
Answer: A hoax is an act, document or artifact intended to deceive or defraud the public. Examples range from relatively benign instances of trickery, such as April Fools pranks, to scientific fraud on a grand scale, such as the Piltdown Man hoax of the early 20th century.
The word hoax dates from the 1700s and is believed to be a contraction of hocus — as in hocus pocus, a centuries-old nonsense phrase used by stage magicians (along with abracadabra) to invoke "magic spells."
The advent of the Internet has provided an unparalleled platform for the perpetrators of hoaxes by placing inexpensive, easy-to-use self-publishing tools at everyone's disposal. Email hoaxes in particular spread false information from person to person with astonishing rapidity by encouraging recipients to forward ersatz documents, chain letter-style, to everyone they know. Web hoaxes consist of bogus Websites designed to fool users into believing they are visiting legitimate home pages which in fact present false or misleading information.
Regardless of the specific form it may take, what distinguishes any hoax from mere error or folklore is that it is deliberately deceptive.
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