Hoodwink

 WORD OF THE DAY

hoodwink / verb / HOOD-wink

Definition
1a: to deceive by false appearance
1b: dupe
2 (archaic): blindfold
3 (obsolete): hide

Examples

“A financial advisor’s credentials can be helpful, but beware—sometimes, less scrupulous financial advisors will use irrelevant or fraudulent qualifications to hoodwink clients.”
— Ashley Kilroy, Yahoo Finance, 14 Aug. 2022

Paired with knowledge gleaned over decades from scientists studying the mechanisms the immune system uses to detect foreign invaders, these tools could be used to hoodwink it into regarding the pig as something more akin to a friendly tourist.
—Megan Molteni, STAT, 24 Jan. 2022

Did You Know?
We usually use the word wink to refer to a brief shutting of one eye, but hoodwink draws on an older and more obscure meaning of wink covered in our Unabridged Dictionary: “to close one’s eyes.”
To hoodwink someone originally was to effectively do that kind of winking for the person; it meant to “cover someone’s eyes,” as with a hood or a blindfold.
This 16th-century term soon came to be used figuratively for veiling the truth. “The public ... is as easily hood-winked,” wrote the Irish physician Charles Lucas in 1756, by which time the figurative use had been around for decades—and today, that meaning of the word is far from winking out.