14 January 2021
To hoodwink someone is to deceive or fool them, and the word has a rather straightforward etymology, although the meaning of wink has changed over the centuries, and that can confuse present-day speakers. Hoodwink is a compound of hood + wink, two elements with roots in Proto-Germanic and which are still very much in use today.
Hood, meaning a head covering, appears as early as c. 700 C.E. as an Old English gloss to the Latin word capitium in the Épinal Glossary. And the present-day wink comes from the Old English verb wincian, meaning to close one’s eyes. From the c. 897 Old English translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care:
Ac se þe agiemeleasað ðæt he ðence, ærðæmþe he do, se stæpð forð mid ðæm fotum, & wincað mid ðæm eagum. He gæð on ðone weg, ac he nat on hwæt he gæð, ac he wierð swiðe hræðe on fielle.
(But he who neglects to think before he acts, he steps forth with his feet and winks with his eyes. He goes on his way, but he does not know where he is going, and he very soon comes to a fall.)
Gregory’s original Latin reads oculos claudit (he closes his eyes).
The present-day sense of hood is much the same as it was in the early medieval era, but the sense of wink has changed. Wink now generally refers to the momentary closing of one eye, often in discreet acknowledgement of something. This sense first appears in the fourteenth century and gradually drove out the sense of closing both eyes so one cannot see.
The compound hoodwink appears by the mid sixteenth century. The earliest instance I’m aware of is in a 1562 religious tract, An Apologie of Priuate Masse, arguing for the legality of private celebrations of the mass, saying that old traditions should not govern modern conduct. In this particular instance, though, hoodwink is being used to denote covering women’s faces with a veil and not in the sense of blinding someone:
And will you I beseeche ye reforme al thynges to the very state of the primatiue churche now? Will you suppresse al christian kyngis which were not in the Apostels time? Wyll you alter the state now, and make all thinges to be common? Wyll you disgrace all preachers that woorke not miracles? Wyl you inforce women to hoodwinke them selues in the churche? will you rayle against bisshoppes that kéepe any temporalties?
And about fifty years later, the metaphorical sense of to deceive someone appears. From John Healey’s 1610 translation of Augustine’s City of God:
For the riuer Iordan parted, when Iosuah lead the people ouer it, and when Heliah passed it, as likewise when his follower Heliseus deuided it with Heliah his cloake, and the sunne as wee said before went back in the time of Hezechiah. But Varro doth not say that any one desired this change of Venus. Let not the faithlesse therefore hood winck them-selues in the knowledge of nature, as though Gods power could not alter the nature of any thing from what it was before vnto mans knowledge.
So, not only are the elements of hoodwink old, the word itself has been around for quite a while.
Sources:
An Apologie of Priuate Masse, London: T. Powell, 1562, 8. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Augustine. Of the Citie of God. John Healey, trans. London: George Eld, 1610, 21.8, 848. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
The Épinal-Erfurt Glossary Project, Dictionary of Old English Project, University of Toronto, 2019. Épinal, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 72 (2), fols. 94–107.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. hoodwink, v., hood, n.1, wink, v.1.
Sweet, Henry. King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society, London: N. Trübner & Co., 1871, chap. 39, 286. London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius MS B.xi.