A spurious set is a set of coins that is spurious in origin. In other words, the set is arbitrarily comprised of coins that have no real relationship to each other, other than in the marketer's mind who dreamed up the set. Coins in these sets tend to be low-grade, very over-priced, and generally a bad buy. They usually come in special packaging designed to reinforce the concept of actually appearing to be some kind of meaningful collection. Examples of popular spurious set types include the following:
World War II Set - Typically includes one of each type of circulating coin issued sometime between 1942 and 1945, such as a 1944 penny, a 1942 nickel, a 1943 dime, a 1945 quarter, and maybe a 1943 half dollar. Any combination of these coins and dates would qualify as a spurious "World War II" set. Sets along these lines include the "World War I", "Korean Conflict", "Vietnam War", and "Desert Storm" collections. I've even seen a "Falkland Islands War Memorial" set that included unrelated British and Argentinian coins dated 1982.
Year Sets - Another type of spurious set, but somewhat less offensive to the advanced collector's sensibilities, is the "year set." A popular "year set" contains the three 1943 steel pennies, one from each Mint. Another popular "year set" is comprised of the seven different varieties of 1982 penny.
A similar type of set that carries far more legitimacy is the short set. An example of a short set would be the complete collection of 11 silver nickels issued during World War II. This is a subset of the full set of Jefferson Nickels, but it has some credibility because of the special wartime metallic composition of the coins issued during this time frame.
