Folly

How to spell folly

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce folly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does folly mean?

1. nounA lack of good sense, or a foolish act or idea.
2. nounA costly, decorative building with little practical purpose, often built in a garden or estate.

Folly in a sentence

• Investing the entire pension in one stock was sheer folly.

• The estate's hilltop folly was a mock Greek temple with no roof.

• He later regretted the folly of his youth.

• Tourists climbed the path to photograph the eighteenth-century folly.

Where does folly come from?

Language of origin: French

Folly comes from the Old French word folie, meaning 'madness' or 'foolishness', which English adopted in the 1200s. That noun was built on fol, the Old French word for a fool or a mad person, which in turn descends from the Latin follis, meaning 'bellows' or 'a leather bag of air'. The leap from a bag of air to a foolish person is surprisingly logical: an empty-headed or windy person was likened to a puffed-up, hollow bag, so follis came to suggest someone full of nothing but air. The same fol root gives us the everyday word 'fool'. By the eighteenth century folly also picked up a charming architectural sense, naming an expensive, often useless ornamental building, a structure that was itself a kind of extravagant foolishness. The double 'l' and the '-y' ending follow the French folie, which is worth remembering since the spelling does not double-cross the way many adults expect.

How the word is built

• fol- (from Old French fol: mad, foolish)
• -ly (noun-forming ending from Old French -ie)