Word.ws English Dictionary

pound-foolish

pound-foolish adjective: being unwise in dealing with large amounts of money.

Adjective

pound-foolish (comparative more pound-foolish, superlative most pound-foolish)

  1. Being unwise in dealing with large amounts of money.
    • Accordingly, by Dr. Chen's method of calculation, the copayment experience would have to be deemed even more pound-foolish than we found it to be.1976, MI Roemer with CE Hopkins, “Response to MK Chen”, in Medical Care

Forms of pound-foolish

comparativemore pound-foolish
superlativemost pound-foolish

Origin of pound-foolish

From penny-wise and pound-foolish (“thrifty in the small and wasteful in the large”).

Phrases with pound-foolish

Questions about pound-foolish

What does pound-foolish mean?
Pound-foolish means being unwise in dealing with large amounts of money.
What part of speech is pound-foolish?
Pound-foolish is an adjective.

Words near pound-foolish in the dictionary

  1. pound signs
  2. pound sterling
  3. pound the pavement
  4. pound the table
  5. pound town
  6. pound-foolish
  7. pound-for-pound
  8. pound-force
  9. pound-forces
  10. pound-mass
  11. pound-shop

Source and license

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