canard

plural canards

1. A false or misleading report or story, especially if deliberately so.

   It’s a cinch, now that Spurling has cleared away a century’s worth of misapprehensions and canards.

   2005 August 29, The New Yorker, page 78

   3 more examples

   There is a notion gaining credence that the free market breaks down national barriers, and that corporate globalization's ultimate destination is a hippie paradise where the heart is the only passport and we all live together happily inside a John Lennon song (Imagine there's no country...). This is a canard.

   2006, Arundhati Roy, Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire, page 40

   [W]hen a Hamas spokesman recently stood by his statement that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish children for their matzos – one of the oldest anti-Semitic canards around – European elites were largely silent.

   2014 August 20, “Why Jews are worried [print version: International New York Times, 22 August 2014, p. 8]”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 12 Nov 2020

   It is a canard trotted out by lazy or tendentious journalists that nationalised British Railways lacked entrepreneurial flair.

   2021 November 17, Anthony Lambert, “How do we grow the leisure market?”, in RAIL, number 944, page 37

   Synonyms: hoax

2. aeronauticsA type of aircraft in which the primary horizontal control and stabilization surfaces are in front of the main wing.
3. broadlyaeronauticsA horizontal control and stabilization surface located in front of the main wing of an aircraft.

   Synonyms: foreplane

4. broadlyengineeringAny small winglike structure on a vehicle, usually used for stabilization.