Donald Trump has appeared to take credit for coining the word "fake" in his fight against the media, saying it is "one of the greatest of all terms" he has come up with.

In an interview with Christian TV network TBN, the President was criticising coverage of his response to the crisis in Puerto Rico when he briefly sidetracked and praised himself for using the word to describe the media.

"I think one of the greatest of all terms I've come up with is 'fake'," Mr Trump said.

"I guess other people have used it perhaps over the years, but I've never noticed it."

But the Merriam-Webster dictionary interjected on Twitter, and said the use of the term "fake news" dated back to the late 1800s.

"Our research traces 'fake news' back to at least 1890. But we won't be adding the term to the dictionary… yet," it said.

One of the examples on the dictionary's website is a headline from 1890, which reads "Secretary Brunnell Declares Fake News About His People is Being Telegraphed Over the Country".

The term "fake news" became mainstream during the US election campaign, when hundreds of websites that published falsified or heavily biased stories sprung up to capitalise on Facebook advertising revenue.

Mr Trump and his supporters then adopted the term to describe media coverage critical of the President, especially that of The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.

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Earlier this year Mr Trump claimed in an interivew with The Economist that he invented the phrase "priming the pump", an economic term that originated in the 1930s.

The US President has been under fire for his administration's disaster response Puerto Rico, which was devastated after being hit by Hurricane Maria.

In the TBN interview with Mike Huckabee, Mr Trump was asked if coverage of his response to the natural disasters was "frustrating" given that people on the ground thought his response was "pitch perfect".

"We'll say this, it's fake news, there's nothing else you can say about it," the President said.

"We did a great job and we weren't treated fairly by the media because we really did a good job."