Daft

How to spell daft

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce daft

What does daft mean?

1. adjectiveSilly, foolish, or lacking good sense.

Daft in a sentence

• Spending that much on a kettle is a daft idea.

• He felt daft for locking his keys inside the car again.

Where does daft come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Daft comes from the Old English word gedæfte, which originally meant 'mild', 'gentle' or 'fitting and well-mannered', and was related to gedafenian, a verb meaning 'to be suitable or proper'. In its earliest life the word carried a thoroughly positive sense, describing someone meek and decorous rather than someone silly. Over the medieval period the meaning slid downhill: a person who was overly gentle or meek came to be seen as dull, then as simple, and finally as foolish, so by the late Middle Ages daft had settled into its modern sense of 'foolish' or 'crazy'. It is a close cousin of the word 'deft', which kept the older idea of fitness and skill while daft drifted toward folly. The word remains most at home in British and Irish English, where 'a daft idea' or 'going daft' are everyday phrases, and the short, single-syllable spelling is the chief reason it is so easy to write.

How the word is built

• daft (single root from Old English gedæfte: mild, gentle, fitting)