fooling

Pluralfoolings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of fool.

   The magician was fooling the audience with clever sleight of hand.

   The boys were fooling around in the yard until dinner was ready.

   Note

   One spelling carries two different verbs. With an object, fooling means deceiving: fooling the audience, fooling yourself. Without an object, it means acting foolishly, and the subject is the one who looks silly. As a gerund it keeps that power to take an object (fooling voters is easy). That is how to tell it apart from the noun for silly behavior, which never takes one.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Foolish or playful conduct; the act of joking around or behaving without seriousness.

   Enough fooling. We have serious decisions to make tonight.

   His constant fooling eventually wore out the rest of the team.

   Similarclowning, joking, silliness, horseplay, nonsense

   Note

   A noun that works both as a mass and as a count. As a mass noun it names silliness in general, the way enough fooling or his constant fooling does. As a count noun it names separate episodes, and the plural foolings exists for exactly that use: individual bouts of clowning that can be told apart and counted.

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