fool definition | Dictionary.com

fool

1 [fool]

–noun

1.	a silly or stupid person; a person who lacks judgment or sense.

2.	a professional jester, formerly kept by a person of royal or noble rank for amusement: the court fool.

3.	a person who has been tricked or deceived into appearing or acting silly or stupid: to make a fool of someone.

4.	an ardent enthusiast who cannot resist an opportunity to indulge an enthusiasm (usually prec. by a present participle): He's just a dancing fool.

5.	a weak-minded or idiotic person.

–verb (used with object)

6.	to trick, deceive, or impose on: They tried to fool him.

–verb (used without object)

7.	to act like a fool; joke; play.

8.	to jest; pretend; make believe: I was only fooling.

—Verb phrases

fool around,

a.	to putter aimlessly; waste time: She fooled around all through school.

b.	to philander or flirt.

c.	to be sexually promiscuous, esp. to engage in adultery.

10.	fool away, to spend foolishly, as time or money; squander: to fool away the entire afternoon.

11.	fool with, to handle or play with idly or carelessly: to be hurt while fooling with a loaded gun; to fool with someone's affections.

—Idiom

12.	be nobody's fool, to be wise or shrewd.

Origin:
1225–75; ME fol, fool < OF fol < L follis bellows, bag; cf. follis

Synonyms:
1. simpleton, dolt, dunce, blockhead, numskull, ignoramus, dunderhead, ninny, nincompoop, booby, saphead, sap. 2. zany, clown. 5. moron, imbecile, idiot. 6. delude, hoodwink, cheat, gull, hoax, cozen, dupe, gudgeon.

Antonyms:
1. genius.

fool

2 [fool]

–noun British Cookery.

a dish made of fruit, scalded or stewed, crushed and mixed with cream or the like: gooseberry fool.

Origin:
1590–1600; prob. special use of fool ¹

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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Link To fool

fool (fōōl)

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.

v. fooled, fool·ing, fools

v. tr.

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.

v. intr.

Informal
1. To speak or act facetiously or in jest; joke: I was just fooling when I said I had to leave.
2. To behave comically; clown.
3. 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.

adj. 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.

Phrasal Verb(s):
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 awayTo waste (time or money) foolishly; squander: fooled away the week's pay on Friday night.

Idiom(s):
play/act the fool

To act in an irresponsible or foolish manner.
To behave in a playful or comical manner.

[Middle English fol, from Old French, from Late Latin follis, windbag, fool, from Latin follis, bellows; see bhel-² in Indo-European roots.]

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."

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Main Entry:	fool
Part of Speech:	n
Definition:	See court jester

Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon
Copyright © 2003-2009 Dictionary.com, LLC
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Language Translation for : fool

Spanish: tonto, imbécil,

German: der Narr, *die Närrin,

Japanese: 愚か者

More Translations »

Fool

Fool\, n. [Cf. F. fouler to tread, crush. Cf. 1st Foil.] A compound of gooseberries scalded and crushed, with cream; -- commonly called gooseberry fool.

Fool

Fool\, n. [OE. fol, n. & adj., F. fol, fou, foolish, mad; a fool, prob. fr. L. follis a bellows, wind bag, an inflated ball; perh. akin to E. bellows. Cf. Folly, Follicle.]

1. One destitute of reason, or of the common powers of understanding; an idiot; a natural.

2. A person deficient in intellect; one who acts absurdly, or pursues a course contrary to the dictates of wisdom; one without judgment; a simpleton; a dolt.

Extol not riches, then, the toil of fools. --Milton.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other. --Franklin.

3. (Script.) One who acts contrary to moral and religious wisdom; a wicked person.

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. --Ps. xiv. 1.

4. One who counterfeits folly; a professional jester or buffoon; a retainer formerly kept to make sport, dressed fantastically in motley, with ridiculous accouterments.

Can they think me . . . their fool or jester? --Milton.

April fool, Court fool, etc. See under April, Court, etc.

Fool's cap, a cap or hood to which bells were usually attached, formerly worn by professional jesters.

Fool's errand, an unreasonable, silly, profitless adventure or undertaking.

Fool's gold, iron or copper pyrites, resembling gold in color.

Fool's paradise, a name applied to a limbo (see under Limbo) popularly believed to be the region of vanity and nonsense. Hence, any foolish pleasure or condition of vain self-satistaction.

Fool's parsley (Bot.), an annual umbelliferous plant ([AE]thusa Cynapium) resembling parsley, but nauseous and poisonous.

To make a fool of, to render ridiculous; to outwit; to shame. [Colloq.]

To play the fool, to act the buffoon; to act a foolish part. "I have played the fool, and have erred exceedingly." --1 Sam. xxvi. 21.

Fool

Fool\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Fooled; p. pr. & vb. n. Fooling.] To play the fool; to trifle; to toy; to spend time in idle sport or mirth.

Is this a time for fooling? --Dryden.

Fool

Fool\, v. t. 1. To infatuate; to make foolish. --Shak.

For, fooled with hope, men favor the deceit. --Dryden.

2. To use as a fool; to deceive in a shameful or mortifying manner; to impose upon; to cheat by inspiring foolish confidence; as, to fool one out of his money.

You are fooled, discarded, and shook off By him for whom these shames ye underwent. --Shak.

To fool away, to get rid of foolishly; to spend in trifles, idleness, folly, or without advantage.

fool

n. As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who habitually reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect premises and cannot be persuaded by evidence to do otherwise; it is not generally used in its other senses, i.e., to describe a person with a native incapacity to reason correctly, or a clown. Indeed, in hackish experience many fools are capable of reasoning all too effectively in executing their errors. See also cretin, loser, fool file.

The Algol 68-R compiler used to initialize its storage to the character string "F00LF00LF00LF00L..." because as a pointer or as a floating point number it caused a crash, and as an integer or a character string it was very recognizable in a dump. Sadly, one day a very senior professor at Nottingham University wrote a program that called him a fool. He proceeded to demonstrate the correctness of this assertion by lobbying the university (not quite successfully) to forbid the use of Algol on its computers. See also DEADBEEF.

Jargon File 4.2.0
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fool (n.)

c.1275, from O.Fr. fol "madman, insane person," also an adj. meaning "mad, insane," from L. follis "bellows, leather bag," in V.L. used with a sense of "windbag, empty-headed person" (see follicle). Cf. also Skt. vatula- "insane," lit. "windy, inflated with wind."

"The word has in mod.Eng. a much stronger sense than it had at an earlier period; it has now an implication of insulting contempt which does not in the same degree belong to any of its synonyms, or to the derivative foolish." [OED]

Meaning "jester, court clown" first attested 1370, though it is not always possible to tell whether the reference is to a professional entertainer or an amusing lunatic on the payroll. As the name of a kind of custard dish, it is attested from 1598 (the food was also called trifle, which may be the source of the name). The verb meaning "to make a fool of" is recorded from 1596. Feast of Fools (c.1320), from M.L. festum stultorum) refers to the burlesque festival celebrated in some churches on New Year's Day in medieval times. Fool's gold "iron pyrite" is from 1882. Fool's paradise "state of illusory happiness" is from 1462. Fool around is 1875 in the sense of "pass time idly," 1970s in sense of "have sexual adventures." Foolosopher, a most useful insult, turns up in a 1549 translation of Erasmus.

FOOL
Fool's Lisp. A small Scheme interpreter.
(ftp://scam.berkeley.edu/src/local/fools.tar.Z).
(1994-10-04)

fool

In addition to the idioms beginning with fool, also see make a fool of; nobody's fool; no fool like an old fool; not suffer fools gladly; play the fool; take for (a fool). Also see under foolish.

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