hoodwink

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The Word of the Day for February 9 is:

hoodwink   \HOOD-wink\   verb 
     : to deceive by false appearance : dupe 

Example sentence: 
     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. 





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