Definition of "canard"

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

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 ”, in The New York Times‎

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