purport

From Middle English purporten, from Anglo-Norman purporter and Old French porporter (“convey, contain, carry”), from pur-, from Latin pro (“forth”) + Old French porter (“carry”), from Latin portō (“carry”).

• (verb, UK) IPA^(key): /pəˈpɔːt/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• (verb, US) IPA^(key): /pɚˈpɔɹt/
• (noun, UK) IPA^(key): /ˈpɜːpɔːt/, /ˈpɜːpət/
• (noun, US) IPA^(key): /ˈpɚpɔɹt/

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɔː(ɹ)t

purport (third-person singular simple present purports, present participle purporting, simple past and past participle purported)

1. To convey, imply, or profess (often falsely or inaccurately). [(usually) with to (+ infinitive)]

   He purports himself to be an international man of affairs.

   • 1962 August, “More W.R. services in jeopardy”, in Modern Railways, page 82, photo caption:

     The intermediate station seen here, Llanbister Road, is 5 hilly miles by road from the town it purports to serve.

2. To intend. [(usually) with to (+ infinitive)]

   He purported to become an international man of affairs.

   • 2022, Harry Hobbs, George Williams, “Prince Leonard Prepares for War” (chapter 1), in Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty, Cambridge University Press, →DOI, page 18:

     In all cases, however, although micronations may purport to assert sovereignty in any number of ways, they remain conceptually distinct from recognised sovereign states.

purport (plural purports)

1. Import, intention or purpose.
   • 1748, [David Hume], Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, London: […] A[ndrew] Millar, […], →OCLC, part 2:

     My practice, you say, refutes my doubts. But you mistake the purport of my question.

   • 1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “I, Aristocracies”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, →OCLC, book IV (Horoscope):

     Sorrowful, phantasmal as this same Double Aristocracy of Teachers and Governors now looks, it is worth all men’s while to know that the purport of it is, and remains, noble and most real.

   • 1939, Ernest Vincent Wright, Gadsby:

     A child’s brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adult’s act, and figuring out its purport.

2. (obsolete) A disguise; a covering.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 52:

     For she her sex under that strange purport / Did use to hide.

• “purport”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

• prorupt