hoodwink

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for February 9, 2007 is: hoodwink • \HOOD-wink\ • verb : to deceive by false appearance : dupe Examples: The dishonest art dealer hoodwinked Edward, convincing him to pay top dollar for a relatively worthless painting. 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. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.