Q: I was reading a Trollope novel (Lady Anna, 1871) and found this passage: “The Earl, however, was but a young man, likely to be taken by mere beauty; and it might be that the girl had been clever enough to hoodwink him.” Can “hoodwink” be that old? And how did it come to mean deceive?
A: The verb “hoodwink” is a lot older than that. It first appeared in the 16th century but has roots in the Old English words for “hood” and “wink,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Anglo-Saxon days, a hood (or hod) referred to a head covering, while wincian meant to close one’s eyes.
The OED’s earliest written example for “hood” is from the Epinal Glossary, which dates from some time before 700. An entry in the glossary gives the Latin and Old English words for a head covering: “Capitium, hood.”
The first Oxford citation for wincian, which we’ve expanded here, is from Pastoral Care, King Alfred’s late ninth-century translation of Liber Regulae Pastoralis, a sixth-century Latin treatise by Pope Gregory:
“Ac se þe agimeleasaþ ðæt he ðence, ærðæmðe he do, se stæpð forð mid ðam fotum & wincaþ mid ðæm eagum” (“But he who fails to think before acting, steps forth with his feet and winketh with [closes] his eyes”).
When the verb “hoodwink” showed up in 16th-century writing, it was used literally and meant to “cover the eyes with a hood or other covering so as to prevent vision; to blindfold,” the OED says.
The dictionary’s first citation is from an anonymous treatise on Roman Catholic masses celebrated privately: “Will you enforce women to hoodwink themselves in the church?” (from An Apologie of Priuate Masse, 1562).
In the early 17th century, “hoodwink” took on its modern figurative sense, which Oxford defines as to “blindfold mentally; to prevent (any one) from seeing the truth or fact; to ‘throw dust in the eyes’ of, deceive, humbug.”
The earliest example refers to people who deceive themselves: “Let not the faithlesse therefore hood-winck them-selues in the knowledge of nature” (from John Healey’s 1610 translation of Augustine’s The City of God, a fifth-century work entitled De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos in Latin).
Finally, here’s an OED example, which we’ve expanded, from An Essay on Waters (1756), by Charles Lucas, an Irish apothecary, physician, and politician:
“The public, though a many-headed monster, is as easily hood-winked, as if it had but one head or one eye. The multitude is as often, as sensibly, affected by artful falsehoods, as by plane truths, and frequently more so.”
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