The number of these synonyms in English is very great. Artificial is the antonym of natural and real and usually indicates something man-made, in imitation of something found in life or nature. The term can be ameliorative: there is nothing innately bad about an artificial lake. But it can also be pejorative: The flower I had admired so much turned out to be artificial. Counterfeit is clearly pejorative, as in counterfeit money; a counterfeit is an imitation deliberately intended to deceive, and dishonestly at that. Ersatz, a word borrowed from German, applies only to things clearly inferior to those they are intended to replace. Thus, ersatz coffee usually tastes terrible. Fake and sham things are patently false: fake eyelashes or false eyelashes will usually deceive no one, even if, like false teeth, they may be better for their purposes than nothing. Spurious also makes clear the deliberate deception: a spurious police officer is someone pretending to be a police officer, probably for no honorable purpose. A substitute police officer, like a substitute teacher, may not always be inferior to the original, but our experience leads us to expect that to be the case; hence substitute is frequently pejorative. Synthetic is not necessarily pejorative but rather suggests something made chemically to approximate as nearly as possible something natural: synthetic rubber.
