Word of the Day

: August 4, 2013

hoodwink

verb HOOD-wink

What It Means

: to deceive by false appearance : dupe

hoodwink in Context

By making it look like a fun, enjoyable privilege instead of an exhausting chore, Tom Sawyer hoodwinks Ben Rogers into helping him whitewash Aunt Polly's fence.

"In Moliére's classic comedy, the religious fraud Tartuffe has hoodwinked rich merchant Orgon and is poised to marry his host's teenage daughter, to seduce his lovely wife and to take over his gullible patron’s fortune-unless someone stops him." - From an article in The Edmond Sun (Oklahoma), June 25, 2013

Did You Know?

A now-obsolete sense of the word "wink" is "to close one's eyes," and "hoodwink" once meant to cover the eyes of someone, such as a prisoner, with a hood or blindfold. ("Hoodwink" was also once a name for the game of blindman's buff.) This 16th-century term soon came to be used figuratively for veiling the truth. "The Public is easily hood-winked," wrote the Irish physician Charles Lucas in 1756, by which time the figurative use had been around for almost a century and a half. Over two hundred and fifty years later, this meaning of the word hasn't changed a wink.