Simple Definition of hoodwink
: to deceive or trick (someone)
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.>
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.
Origin of hoodwink
1hood + wink
First Known Use: 1562
Rhymes with hoodwink
HOODWINK Defined for Kids
Definition of hoodwink for Students
: to mislead by trickery <“I will personally be ensuring that no underage student hoodwinks our impartial judge …” — J. K. Rowling, Goblet of Fire>
Seen and Heard
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