Definition of "real thing" []

• Informal usage attributing authenticity (noun)

WordNet. Princeton University. 2010.

• "So these boys got their lesson even earlier in life than I got mine -- that the church was a kind of amiable fake, a pious horn-blowing; while the real thing was Tammany."
• "They may spell words in ways that look pretty close to the real thing but are unpronounceable or mispronounceable as spelled."
• "The Gormer milieu represented a social out-skirt which Lily had alwavs fastidiously avoided; but it struck her, now that she was in it, as only a flamboyant copy of her own world, a caricature approximating the real thing as the “society play” approaches the manners of the drawing-room."