folly.
Foolishness that results from a lack of foresight or lack of practicality.
Meaning & usage
Foolishness that results from a lack of foresight or lack of practicality.
It would be folly to walk all that way, knowing the shops are probably shut by now.
Thoughtless action resulting in tragic consequence.
The purchase of Alaska from Russia was termed Seward's folly.
A fanciful building built for purely ornamental reasons.
A luncheonette in the shape of a coffee cup is particularly conspicuous, as is intended of an architectural duck or folly.
Where this word comes from
Inherited from Middle English folie, from Old French folie (“madness”), from the adjective fol (“mad, insane”).
To follow.
A clump of trees, particularly one on the crest of a hill (or sometimes on a stretch of open ground).
Where this word comes from
Uncertain. The most common theory is that term primarily denotes a clump of trees and relates to French feuille, feuillée and English foliage; it has also been suggested that it refers to some perceived connection or resemblance of the named place to an architectural folly, but many places so named have no architectural follies and cannot be named directly for them.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.