fool (fūl)
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, fools.

v.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.
   1. To speak or act facetiously or in jest; joke: I was just fooling when I said I had to leave.
   2. To behave comically; clown.
   3. 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

1. To waste (time or money) foolishly; squander: fooled away the week's pay on Friday night.

idiom:

play (or 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.]

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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The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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