| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| fool |
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| PRONUNCIATION: |  f l |
| NOUN: | 1. One who is deficient in judgment, sense, or understanding. 2. One who acts unwisely on a given occasion: I was a fool to have quit my job. 3. One who has been tricked or made to appear ridiculous; a dupe: They made a fool of me by pretending I had won. 4. Informal A person with a talent or enthusiasm for a certain activity: a dancing fool; a fool for skiing. 5. A member of a royal or noble household who provided entertainment, as with jokes or antics; a jester. 6. One who subverts convention or orthodoxy or varies from social conformity in order to reveal spiritual or moral truth: a holy fool. 7. A dessert made of stewed or puréed fruit mixed with cream or custard and served cold. 8. Archaic A mentally deficient person; an idiot. | | VERB: | Inflected forms: fooled, fool·ing, fools
| | TRANSITIVE VERB: | 1. To deceive or trick; dupe: “trying to learn how to fool a trout with a little bit of floating fur and feather” (Charles Kuralt). 2. To confound or prove wrong; surprise, especially pleasantly: We were sure they would fail, but they fooled us. | | INTRANSITIVE VERB: | 1. 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. 2. To engage in idle or frivolous activity. 3. 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 1. To engage in idle or casual activity; putter: was fooling around with the old car in hopes of fixing it. 2. To engage in frivolous activity; make fun. 3. 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. | | IDIOM: | play (or act) the fool 1. To act in an irresponsible or foolish manner. 2. To behave in a playful or comical manner. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Middle English fol, from Old French, from Late Latin follis, windbag, fool, from Latin follis, bellows. See bhel-2 in Appendix I. | | 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.”
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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