Only a fool would ride a motorcycle without wearing a helmet.
2
a
: a retainer (see retainerentry 1 sense 1) formerly kept in great households to provide casual entertainment and commonly dressed in motley with cap, bells, and bauble
b
: one who is victimized or made to appear foolish: dupe
History has made fools of many rash prophets.
3
a
: a harmlessly deranged person or one lacking in common powers of understanding
b
: one with a marked propensity or fondness for something
a dancing fool
a fool for candy
4
: a cold dessert of pureed fruit mixed with whipped cream or custard
Noun those fools who ride motorcycles without wearing helmets Only a fool would ask such a silly question. You'd be a fool to believe what he tells you. You're making yourself look like a fool. Adjective The dog was barking its fool head off. Some fool driver kept trying to pass me! Verb When she first told us that she was getting married, we thought she was fooling. His disguise didn't fool anybody. He really had me fooled. Stop fooling yourself—she doesn't really love you. See More
Recent Examples on the Web
Noun
Mahomes is motivated after a disappointing end to 2021, and only a fool would pick the Chargers to take the division. Jason Gay, WSJ, 8 Sep. 2022 Other suspects considered Köpernick a heartless lover, a wastrel father, a blackmailer, a fool and a creep. Amy Nicholson, Variety, 7 Sep. 2022 Fox plays a major character role — curious, energetic, sometimes a bit of a fool, always entertaining. Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily News, 4 Sep. 2022 In America in 2022, distress was the new gold—or maybe fool’s gold. Lila Maclellan, Fortune, 19 Aug. 2022 But to play amateur shrink—or worse, amateur judge—is a fool’s errand at best and cruel at worst. Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 13 Aug. 2022 Only a fool would turn down the opportunity to watch haughty penguins refuse fish offered to them by beleaguered zookeepers, but the endless explaining was exhausting. Ky Henderson, Rolling Stone, 25 July 2022 Only a fool thinks the funniest comics are the most popular or that deeply respected ones don’t remain obscure.New York Times, 14 July 2022 Kaiser’s latest turn will do little to dissuade some skeptics, given that the very value of a cryptocurrency rests on what those critics say is finding a greater fool to buy it. Steven Zeitchik, Washington Post, 2 July 2022
Verb
But about $20 billion of those payments went to scammers who posed as prison inmates — or, in one instance, faked being Sen. Dianne Feinstein — to fool state officials into sending them checks. Gregory Yeestaff Writer, Los Angeles Times, 14 Sep. 2022 The tech blogger Ben Dickson has argued that GPT-3’s ability to fool readers into believing its output was human-written isn’t proof of its sophistication, but evidence of our impoverished expectations.WIRED, 11 Sep. 2022 The message attempted to fool the person into entering a credit card number to pay to fix the computer. Bruce Geiselman, cleveland, 10 Sep. 2022 The point of his original documentary had been broader: to demonstrate that pretty much anyone could fool a doping test. Peter Debruge, Variety, 4 Sep. 2022 In their response, the company explained that this was a friendly comment not intended to fool anyone, and Gayle never tried to hide the fact that the song already existed. Elizabeth Logan, Glamour, 28 Aug. 2022 The chicken itself is cooked thoroughly, and a shade of brown that may fool consumers into thinking the breading is burnt. Palak Jayswal, The Salt Lake Tribune, 15 Aug. 2022 Our noses are difficult to fool—the number of smells humans can distinguish may be as many as one trillion—so it’s sometimes better not to try.Wired, 2 Aug. 2022 Be wary of those that try to fool us by proclaiming that their AI driving system has an unblemished record. Lance Eliot, Forbes, 1 Aug. 2022 See More
Word History
Etymology
Noun, Adjective, and Verb
Middle English, from Anglo-French fol, from Late Latin follis, from Latin, bellows, bag; akin to Old High German bolla blister, balg bag — more at belly