Foolishness

How to spell foolishness

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce foolishness

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does foolishness mean?

1. nounThe state or quality of being silly, unwise, or lacking good judgement.

Foolishness in a sentence

• Spending the entire savings on lottery tickets was sheer foolishness.

• The manager regretted the foolishness of ignoring the safety report.

Where does foolishness come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is built on the older noun 'fool', which English borrowed from Old French 'fol' (also 'fou'), meaning a madman, a jester, or a silly person. That French word descended from the Latin 'follis', which literally meant a pair of bellows or a leather bag full of air; the same image gave rise to the sense of a windbag or an empty-headed person. By the medieval period English speakers were forming the adjective 'foolish' by adding the native suffix '-ish', and from there '-ness' was attached to create an abstract noun naming the quality itself. The layered construction (fool, then foolish, then foolishness) is a tidy example of how English stacks suffixes onto a borrowed root. Remembering that the word is simply 'foolish' plus '-ness' keeps the double letters and the central 'sh' from going astray.

How the word is built

• fool (a silly or unwise person)
• -ish (adjective suffix: having the quality of)
• -ness (noun suffix: state or condition of)