Fool

How to spell fool

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fool

What does fool mean?

1. nounA person who behaves in a silly or unwise way, or who lacks good sense.
2. verbTo trick or deceive someone, or to act in a joking, idle way.
3. nounA cold British dessert made of cooked fruit folded into whipped cream or custard.

Fool in a sentence

• noun

  Only a fool would lend that much money without a contract.

• verb

  The cheap copy did not fool the experienced appraiser.

• noun

  She served a gooseberry fool in tall glasses after dinner.

• noun

  He felt like a fool after locking his keys inside the running car.

• verb

  Do not fool yourself into thinking the deadline will move.

• noun

  The recipe turns stewed rhubarb into a quick summer fool.

Where does fool come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes through Old French fol, meaning 'mad', 'silly', or 'a jester', which in turn goes back to the Latin follis, literally a 'bellows' or 'leather bag of air'. The leap in meaning is a memorable one: a follis was a windbag, and the sense slid playfully from 'puffed-up bag of wind' to an empty-headed or foolish person. English borrowed the word in the 1200s, and it quickly settled into both the noun for a silly person and the medieval court 'fool' or jester. The verb sense, meaning to deceive or to act idly, grew out of the same noun by the 1500s. A pleasant later branch is the British dessert called a fruit fool, recorded from around the same period, possibly playing on the idea of something light and trifling. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, with the double 'o' simply representing the long 'oo' sound.

How the word is built

• fool (single root, from Old French fol; no prefix or suffix)