Word.ws English Dictionary

fooling around

fooling around is the present participle and gerund of fool around.

Meaning of fool around

Verb

fool around (third-person singular simple present fools around, present participle fooling around, simple past and past participle fooled around)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To engage in frivolous behaviour; to monkey around.
  2. (intransitive) To waste time.
  3. (idiomatic, informal, intransitive) To engage in casual or flirtatious sexual acts.
    • Jake has been fooling around with a married woman.
  4. (informal, intransitive) To engage in adultery; to play around.

Questions about fooling around

What is fooling around the present participle and gerund of?
Fooling around is the present participle and gerund of fool around.

Words near fooling around in the dictionary

  1. fooligans
  2. foolin'
  3. fooling
  4. fooling about
  5. fooling along
  6. fooling around
  7. fooling away
  8. fooling up
  9. fooling with
  10. foolings
  11. foolio

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fooling around (page history and authors); fool around (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “fooling around.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fooling_around. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.