(fo͞ol)
noun- One who is deficient in judgment, sense, or understanding.
- One who acts unwisely on a given occasion: I was a fool to have quit my job.
- One who has been tricked or made to appear ridiculous; a dupe: They made a fool of me by pretending I had won.
- Informal A person with a talent or enthusiasm for a certain activity: a dancing fool; a fool for skiing.
- A member of a royal or noble household who provided entertainment, as with jokes or antics; a jester.
- One who subverts convention or orthodoxy or varies from social conformity in order to reveal spiritual or moral truth: a holy fool.
- A dessert made of stewed or puréed fruit mixed with cream or custard and served cold.
- Archaic A mentally deficient person; an idiot.
verb fooled,
fool·ing,
fools verb, transitive- To deceive or trick; dupe: “trying to learn how to fool a trout with a little bit of floating fur and feather” (Charles Kuralt).
- To confound or prove wrong; surprise, especially pleasantly: We were sure they would fail, but they fooled us.
verb, intransitive- Informal
a. To speak or act facetiously or in jest; joke: I was just fooling when I said I had to leave.
b. To behave comically; clown.
c. To feign; pretend: He said he had a toothache but he was only fooling.
- To engage in idle or frivolous activity.
- To toy, tinker, or mess: shouldn't fool with matches.
adjective Informal Foolish; stupid: off on some fool errand or other.
Phrasal Verbs: fool around Informal To engage in idle or casual activity; putter:
was fooling around with the old car in hopes of fixing it. To engage in frivolous activity; make fun. To engage in casual, often promiscuous sexual acts.
fool away To waste (time or money) foolishly; squander:
fooled away the week's pay on Friday night.Word History: The pejorative nature of the term
fool is strengthened by a knowledge of its etymology. Its source, the Latin word
follis, meant “a bag or sack, a large inflated ball, a pair of bellows.” Users of the word in Late Latin, however, saw a resemblance between the bellows or the inflated ball and a person who was what we would call “a windbag” or “an airhead.” The word, which passed into English by way of French, is first recorded in English in a work written around the beginning of the 13th century with the sense “a foolish, stupid, or ignorant person.”
