meaning - Searching for a rare word for "something taken as truth due to having been repeated so much"


I'm searching for a certain single, rare, literary word meaning "something taken as truth due to having been repeated so much". This "something" could be either true or false. It is not necessarily pernicious or benign.


An example of such a "something" (at the risk of getting political) is that Osama Bin Laden was killed in May 2011.


Does anyone know the word I'm searching for?


P.S.: "Factoid" is ticked — however, there may exist an even better fit.



Answer



Proof by (repeated) assertion?



… is an informal fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction. Sometimes, this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to its not being contradicted (argumentum ad nauseam). In other cases, its repetition may be cited as evidence of its truth, in a variant of the appeal to authority or appeal to belief fallacies.



factoid ?



an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact: he addresses the facts and factoids which have buttressed the film’s legend



Note (from same source): North American a brief or trivial item of news or information: how does the brain retain factoids that you remember from a history test at school?


The North American usage is different from the basic meaning of the word.


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