The amount of truth a statement has.

The quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.

Origin: Stephen Colbert, "The Colbert Report," 2005

"And that brings us to tonight's word: truthiness.

"Now I'm sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster's, are gonna say, 'Hey, that's not a word.' Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that's my right. I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart."

From Yahoo! News:
Colbert: AP the Biggest Threat to America By JAKE COYLE, AP Entertainment Writer
54 minutes ago

Stung by a recent Associated Press article that didn't credit him for coining the word "truthiness," Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert has struck back.

The world's oldest news organization, Colbert says, is the "No. 1 threat facing America."

On Wednesday evening, Colbert placed the AP atop the Threat Down segment of "The Colbert Report" show. What was No. 2?

Bears.

In October, on Colbert's debut episode of the "Daily Show" spinoff, the comedian defined "truthiness" as truth that wouldn't stand to be held back by facts. The word caught on, and last week the American Dialect Society named "truthiness" the word of the year.

When an AP story about the designation sent coast to coast failed to mention Colbert, he began a tongue-in-cheek crusade, not unlike the kind his muse Bill O'Reilly might lead in all seriousness.

"It's a sin of omission, is what it is," Colbert told The AP on Thursday. "You're not giving people the whole story about truthiness."

"It's like Shakespeare still being alive and not asking him what `Hamlet' is about," he said.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a definition for "truthy" dating back to the 1800s. It's defined as "characterized by truth" and includes the derivation "truthiness."

Michael Adams, a visiting associate professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in lexicology, pointed to that ...

Stephen Colbert defines truthiness as "The quality by which one purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or intellectual examination".

According to an interview Stephen Colbert gave on 60 minutes, he defined it this way:

"Truthiness is what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer, as opposed to what reality will support."

An opinion of what is true, unincumbered by the facts

1. The concept that a person's perception and how they 'feel' about things supersedes fact

2. The complete disregard for any body of evidence or advice from the scientific community when contesting facts

3. Negation of events or information widely accepted to be true

derives from the word 'truth'; a satirical term to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts