Fooling

How to spell fooling

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fooling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fooling mean?

1. verbTricking or deceiving someone, or behaving in a playful, silly way.

Fooling in a sentence

• He was only fooling when he said the meeting was cancelled.

• The salesman was fooling customers with false discount claims.

Where does fooling come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the present participle of the verb 'fool', which traces back to the Old French noun 'fol', meaning a madman, jester, or simpleton, and beyond that to the Latin 'follis', which literally meant a pair of bellows or a leather bag puffed up with air. The leap from a bag of air to a foolish person came through the idea of an empty-headed or wind-bag character, someone full of nothing but air. English adopted the noun in the 1200s and soon turned it into a verb meaning to act foolishly and then to deceive or trick. The doubled 'o' belongs to the root 'fool' and stays intact when '-ing' is simply added, with no letter dropped. A distant relative through the same Latin root is the medical word 'follicle', another small bag-like structure.

How the word is built

• fool (from foll: a foolish person)
• -ing (present participle suffix)