Word.ws English Dictionary

hoodwinkery

hoodwinkery noun: the process or act of hoodwinking; deception, trickery.

Noun

hoodwinkery (countable and uncountable, plural hoodwinkeries)

  1. (informal, uncountable) The process or act of hoodwinking; deception, trickery.
    • This actress is a brilliant comedienne, a mistress of the art of insinuation, extremely skilled in the hoodwinkery of gestures of which Duse was the greatest exponent.1958, George Freedley, The Lunts, Macmillan, page 77
    • I do not level a blanket accusation of hoodwinkery and deception. I only say that there have been such cases of this in the past, and I am pleased to say that the chances of such cases happening in the future would be considerably reduced by passage of the proposed legislation and by section 212 of...1973, Bob Bartlett, quotee, Legal Compilation; Statutes and Legislative History, Executive Orders, Regulations, Guidelines and Reports, volume 2, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, page 1057
  2. (countable, informal, rare) An instance of hoodwinking; a deception or trick.
    • When a conjurer truly enjoys his work, when he radiates that uncounterfeitable pleasure he derives from doing his mysterious hoodwinkeries, no audience in the world can resist him.1940, Jean Hugard, Frederick Braué, Expert Card Technique, Dover Publications, →ISBN, page 435
    • He had found the time to dip into a good many books, and proved an adept in the art of persuading people that he had plumbed the depths of his subject, whereas he had barely skimmed the surface, a hoodwinkery which for success requires a certain native coolness and poker-face skill.1946, Montague Summers, Witchcraft and Black Magic, Dover Publications, →ISBN, page 112

Examples of hoodwinkery in a sentence

  • I do not level a blanket accusation of hoodwinkery and deception.1973, Bob Bartlett, quotee, Legal Compilation; Statutes and Legislative History, Executive Orders, Regulations, Guidelines and Reports...
  • For there is no greater loss than the loss of a child—to the world's hoodwinkery.1979, Fanny Howe, Holy Smoke, University of Alabama Press, →ISBN, page 17:
  • The source of hoodwinkery has shifted from the all-powerful (ad agencies, governments, MTV) to the tweeting masses—and lo, charlatanism is democratized.2009 August 24, Scott Brown, “Wired's Guide to Hoaxes: How to Give — and Take — a Joke”, in Wired:
  • That's barely the beginning of Scorsese and Dylan's hoodwinkery: The two are like mischievous twins, playing jokes on mom.2019 June 12, Stephanie Zacharek, “Martin Scorsese's Bob Dylan Film Rolling Thunder Revue Is One of the Most Truthful Movies You'll See in...

Forms of hoodwinkery

pluralhoodwinkeries

Origin of hoodwinkery

From hoodwink (“to deceive using a disguise; to bewile, dupe, mislead”) + -ery.

Questions about hoodwinkery

What does hoodwinkery mean?
Hoodwinkery means the process or act of hoodwinking; deception, trickery.
How do you use hoodwinkery in a sentence?
I do not level a blanket accusation of hoodwinkery and deception.
What part of speech is hoodwinkery?
Hoodwinkery is a noun.
What is the plural of hoodwinkery?
The plural of hoodwinkery is hoodwinkeries.

Words near hoodwinkery in the dictionary

  1. hoodwinked
  2. hoodwinkedst
  3. hoodwinker
  4. hoodwinkeries
  5. hoodwinkers
  6. hoodwinkery
  7. hoodwinkest
  8. hoodwinketh
  9. hoodwinking
  10. hoodwinkings
  11. hoodwinks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hoodwinkery (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: “hoodwinkery.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hoodwinkery. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.