Word of the Day

: April 1, 2019

hoodwink

verb HOOD-wink

What It Means

: to deceive by false appearance : dupe

hoodwink in Context

All would be wise to remember that we're especially likely to be hoodwinked on April Fools' Day.

"Madsen's fascination with space and rockets and technology could hoodwink you into thinking he was a man of the future; you could miss the fact that his obsession was rooted in nostalgia." — May Jeong, Wired, March 2018

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 quite a while—and today, the meaning of the word hasn't changed a wink.