hoodwink

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verb hood·wink \ ˈhu̇d-ˌwiŋk \

Definition of hoodwink

transitive verb

1 archaic :blindfold

2 obsolete :hide

3 :to deceive by false appearance :dupe

people who allow themselves to be hoodwinked by such promises

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hoodwinker

noun

See hoodwink defined for English-language learners

See hoodwink defined for kids

hoodwink was our Word of the Day on 08/04/2013. Hear the podcast!

Examples of hoodwink in a Sentence

Don't let yourself be hoodwinked into buying things you don't need.
Tom Sawyer famously hoodwinked the other boys into thinking there was nothing more enjoyable than whitewashing a fence.

Recent Examples of hoodwink from the Web

Fraud: A Detroit Road man was hoodwinked out of $26,000 by Jamaican telephone con men.

— bruce geiselman, cleveland.com, "Heroin use suspected in Westlake car crash: police blotter," 5 Aug. 2017
Seeing that audience hoodwinked set me up for a life of wondering: Is an artist obligated to reveal how much of his or her creativity is being assisted by technology?

— david pogue, Scientific American, "Should Artists Reveal How Much They Let Technology Make Creative Choices?," 3 July 2017
A Colorado man who hoodwinked city and county governments, schools, hospitals and even The Denver Post in an environmental scheme that sent computer monitors illegally to Hong Kong, was sentenced Friday to 22 months in a federal penitentiary.

— kirk mitchell, The Denver Post, "Denver scammer gets 22-month prison sentence in Hong Kong shipping scheme," 16 June 2017
The report depicted the board as hoodwinked by bank executives who withheld important facts.

— stacy cowley and jennifer a. kingson, New York Times, "Wells Fargo to Claw Back $75 Million From 2 Former Executives," 10 Apr. 2017
Chris Vettel is a pricelessly clueless but endearingly cheery aristocratic prat as Hope’s fiance Sir Evelyn Oakleigh, and Ali Lane is hysterically agitated as Hope’s frequently hoodwinked mother.

— sam hurwitt, The Mercury News, "Review: ‘Anything Goes’ soars on classic Cole Porter songs," 2 Feb. 2017
South Carolina isn't the only state that has laws against hoodwinking urinalysis tests; a handful of others, including Nebraska, have similar regulations.

— julia scheeres, WIRED, "Drug-Free Urine at $69 a Pee," 3 Sep. 2001

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'hoodwink.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

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. Two hundred and fifty years later, this meaning of the word hasn't changed a wink: "The American public has been hoodwinked and fleeced," wrote Theodore Wolff, for example, in the Iowa State Daily on July 6, 2006.