fool
 fool (fo͞ol)n.
1. One who is deficient in judgment, sense, or understanding.
2. One who acts unwisely on a given occasion:
I was a fool to have quit my job.
3. One who has been tricked or made to appear ridiculous; a dupe:
They made a fool of me by pretending I had won.
4. Informal. A person with a talent or enthusiasm for a certain activity:
a dancing fool; a fool for skiing.
5. A member of a royal or noble household who provided entertainment, as with jokes or antics; a jester.
6. One who subverts convention or orthodoxy or varies from social conformity in order to reveal spiritual or moral truth:
a holy fool.
7. A dessert made of stewed or puréed fruit mixed with cream or custard and served cold.
8. Archaic. A mentally deficient person; an idiot.v. fooled, fool·ing, foolsv. tr.
1. To deceive or trick; dupe: “trying to learn how to fool a trout with a little bit of floating fur and feather” (Charles Kuralt).
2. To confound or prove wrong; surprise, especially pleasantly:
We were sure they would fail, but they fooled us.v. intr.
1. Informal.
a. To speak or act facetiously or in jest; joke:
I was just fooling when I said I had to leave.
b. To behave comically; clown.
c. To feign; pretend:
He said he had a toothache but he was only fooling.
2. To engage in idle or frivolous activity.
3. To toy, tinker, or mess:
shouldn't fool with matches.adj. Informal
Foolish; stupid:
off on some fool errand or other.Phrasal Verbs:fool around Informal
1. To engage in idle or casual activity; putter:
was fooling around with the old car in hopes of fixing it.
2. To engage in frivolous activity; make fun.
3. To engage in casual, often promiscuous sexual acts.fool away
To waste (time or money) foolishly; squander:
fooled away the week's pay on Friday night.Idiom:play/act the fool
1. To act in an irresponsible or foolish manner.
2. To behave in a playful or comical manner. [Middle English fol, from Old French, from Late Latin follis, windbag, fool, from Latin follis, bellows. See bhel-2 in Indo-European Roots.]
Word History: The pejorative nature of the term fool is strengthened by a knowledge of its etymology. Its source, the Latin word follis, meant “a bag or sack, a large inflated ball, a pair of bellows.” Users of the word in Late Latin, however, saw a resemblance between the bellows or the inflated ball and a person who was what we would call “a windbag” or “an airhead.” The word, which passed into English by way of French, is first recorded in English in a work written around the beginning of the 13th century with the sense “a foolish, stupid, or ignorant person.”
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