ALLEGED

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does alleged mean? 

• ALLEGED (adjective)
  The adjective ALLEGED has 2 senses:

1. declared but not proved

2. doubtful or suspect

  Familiarity information: ALLEGED used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ALLEGED (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Declared but not proved

Context example:

alleged abuses of housing benefits

Similar:

declared (made known or openly avowed)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Doubtful or suspect

Synonyms:

alleged; so-called; supposed

Context example:

these so-called experts are no help

Similar:

questionable (subject to question)

 Context examples 

I sometimes thought of standing my trial, for, although I could not deny the facts alleged in the several articles, yet I hoped they would admit of some extenuation.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

The reason alleged was their determined resolution of not leaving their mother at that time of the year.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

But you know my opinion on the reviewers and the alleged critics.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

But neither the business alleged, nor the magnificent compliment, could win Catherine from thinking that some very different object must occasion so serious a delay of proper repose.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

The injustice of his sentence was very flagrant; all Paris was indignant; and it was judged that his religion and wealth rather than the crime alleged against him had been the cause of his condemnation.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

It arose out of a scuffle between two churchwardens, one of whom was alleged to have pushed the other against a pump; the handle of which pump projecting into a school-house, which school-house was under a gable of the church-roof, made the push an ecclesiastical offence.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Miss Temple, having assembled the whole school, announced that inquiry had been made into the charges alleged against Jane Eyre, and that she was most happy to be able to pronounce her completely cleared from every imputation.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

After a short silence, he told me, he did not know how I would take what he was going to say: that in the last general assembly, when the affair of the Yahoos was entered upon, the representatives had taken offence at his keeping a Yahoo (meaning myself) in his family, more like a Houyhnhnm than a brute animal; that he was known frequently to converse with me, as if he could receive some advantage or pleasure in my company; that such a practice was not agreeable to reason or nature, or a thing ever heard of before among them; the assembly did therefore exhort him either to employ me like the rest of my species, or command me to swim back to the place whence I came: that the first of these expedients was utterly rejected by all the Houyhnhnms who had ever seen me at his house or their own; for they alleged, that because I had some rudiments of reason, added to the natural pravity of those animals, it was to be feared I might be able to seduce them into the woody and mountainous parts of the country, and bring them in troops by night to destroy the Houyhnhnms’ cattle, as being naturally of the ravenous kind, and averse from labour.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Chesterton set the whole world laughing with a series of alleged non-partisan essays on the subject, and the whole affair, controversy and controversialists, was well-nigh swept into the pit by a thundering broadside from George Bernard Shaw.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

"That I am not Edward Rochester's bride is the least part of my woe," I alleged: that I have wakened out of most glorious dreams, and found them all void and vain, is a horror I could bear and master; but that I must leave him decidedly, instantly, entirely, is intolerable.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)