What's the difference between fool and simpleton?

Fool


Definition:

  • (n.) A compound of gooseberries scalded and crushed, with cream; -- commonly called gooseberry fool.
  • (n.) One destitute of reason, or of the common powers of understanding; an idiot; a natural.
  • (n.) A person deficient in intellect; one who acts absurdly, or pursues a course contrary to the dictates of wisdom; one without judgment; a simpleton; a dolt.
  • (n.) One who acts contrary to moral and religious wisdom; a wicked person.
  • (n.) One who counterfeits folly; a professional jester or buffoon; a retainer formerly kept to make sport, dressed fantastically in motley, with ridiculous accouterments.
  • (v. i.) To play the fool; to trifle; to toy; to spend time in idle sport or mirth.
  • (v. t.) To infatuate; to make foolish.
  • (v. t.) To use as a fool; to deceive in a shameful or mortifying manner; to impose upon; to cheat by inspiring foolish confidence; as, to fool one out of his money.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) After trading mistakes, Wawrinka got lucky at 30-30, mishitting a service return and fooling Djokovic.
  • (2) How opiates became the love of my life | Alisha Choquette Read more The numbers are not specific to the type of drug used, but we’d be fools to think opiates don’t lead the list.
  • (3) Sage did not suffer fools gladly, and often the world seemed increasingly full of them.
  • (4) But it is difficult not to conclude that the survey, which ends on St Andrew’s day, 30 November, has been something of a fools errand for those loyal driveway-trampers.
  • (5) The idea that these problems exist on the other side of the world, and that we Australians can ignore them by sheltering comfortably in our own sequestered corner of the globe, is a fool’s delusion.” Brandis sought to reach out to Australian Muslims, saying the threat came “principally from a small number of people among us who try to justify criminal acts by perverting the meaning of Islam”.
  • (6) "So don't be fooled again: you cannot afford Labour.
  • (7) The Peppers like to be jerks (at Dingwalls Swan dedicated a song to “all you whiney Britishers who can suck my American cock”), but don’t let the surface attitude fool you.
  • (8) So it is only a fool, like me, who would walk nonchalantly around the headland during a high wind.
  • (9) A few months later, the certificate was discovered being used in Iran to fool people who were accessing Gmail into thinking that their connection was secure; in fact any suitably equipped hacker could have monitored their emails.
  • (10) It's Jane Austen all over again, and we've just fooled ourselves that the complicated financial system has changed a thing.
  • (11) No sufferer of fools, he also found it difficult to put up with what he felt to be the arrogance of some colleagues.
  • (12) An immensely cerebral man, who trained himself to need only six hours of sleep - believing that a woman should have seven and only a fool eight - Mishcon was not a man given to small talk, nor one who would tolerate prattle for the sake of it.
  • (13) Standing Rock protests: this is only the beginning Read more “When the Dakota Access Pipeline breaks (and we know that too many pipelines do), millions of people will have crude-oil-contaminated water … don’t let the automatic sink faucets in your homes fool you – that water comes from somewhere, and the second its source is contaminated, so is your bathtub, and your sink, and your drinking liquid.
  • (14) He has been declared "a Shakespearean fool, the only one who can say what others can't" and "an antidote to the proliferation of neo-Nazi movements which took hold of Hungary and Greece".
  • (15) It helps to make testing fun, capitalizes on the student's natural tendency to fool around, and teaches something in the process.
  • (16) 7.44pm BST The April Fools' Day jokes have slowed as people actually get back to work, so we're going to sign off.
  • (17) He said: "To people of a certain age, Stuart Hall will be known as the presenter of It's A Knockout, a good-natured TV programme in which members of the public cheerfully made fools of themselves on camera.
  • (18) Although his finance minister François Baroin pledged on Friday night that there would be no more "austerity measures", only a fool, or someone who expected to be out of office later this year, would promise otherwise.
  • (19) In other words, Mr Johnson is making a fool of himself and of Britain over issues that will have the deepest national repercussions.
  • (20) Cue the day’s first SPR (silent printer rage): another four minutes eaten up by a printer refusing to be fooled by the off-on tactic.

Simpleton


Definition:

  • (n.) A person of weak intellect; a silly person.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Reading your post I couldn't help but think tonight's simpletons had undergone a similar experience."
  • (2) But these simpletons are absolutely determined to find their seat.
  • (3) There’s a really big willingness to help here in Germany and a mind-boggling number of people that are doing lots for refugees, who are not racist, and I think it’s their voice that should be dominant rather than a handful of simpletons who think they should stir up hatred.” This article was amended on 7 August 2015 to correct the name of the news programme on which Reschke made her comments
  • (4) Maybe because I am a simpleton and sometimes can only process what I can see – the actual sky, rather than invisible cyberspace in which data blips through fibre-optic cables.
  • (5) George W. Bush was a Texan simpleton who took more time playing golf on his computer than deciding on executions while governor.
  • (6) Responses to Doyle’s tweet included one from another Twitter user who asked : “What has a Muslim woman in Croydon, got to do with the horrific events in Belgium, you simpleton?” Another, referring to the far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik, asked : “Did anyone accost you on the streets of Croydon after the Brevik shooting in Norway?
  • (7) Which is also to say, for younger visitors, that the exhibition could even be seen to reduce Diana to the big-spending simpleton who was castigated in Anthony O’Hear’s revisionist essay of 1998, as shallow and self-obsessed.
  • (8) He is by no means the simpleton played by Peter Sellers in Being There, but, like Gardiner, every utterance, however gnomic, is now thought to contain a greater truth.
  • (9) And Navracsics’ hastily put together statement from yesterday seems to only repeat the same category error, a simpleton bureaucrat mantra trying to dodge the absurdity of the EU apparently having no responsibility to give any support to the EU’s own youth orchestra.
  • (10) These use the character of Lennie, the gentle simpleton who doesn't know his own strength from Steinbeck's 1937 novel Of Mice and Men, as a benchmark, with the court writing: "Texas citizens might agree that Steinbeck's Lennie should, by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt" .
  • (11) "I was a simpleton last Saturday evening at Melbourne Park."
  • (12) My husband is pointing out, veeerrryy slowly, as if to a simpleton, that this would involve us trebling our current mortgage.
  • (13) A dverts for insurance comparison websites have long treated the British public like a shower of infantilised simpletons.
  • (14) Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson rapped over "special needs" joke This time it's media regulator Ofcom tut-tutting after Clarkson describes the Ferrari F430 Speciale as "a bit wrong ... that smiling front end ... it looked like a simpleton ... [it] should have been called the 430 Speciale Needs".
  • (15) I liked the idea of an island with a vocation – all islands should have one, surely – and Tico took great pleasure in instructing me in the difference between primary and secondary Atlantic rainforest (simpleton that I am, I thought all forest was good, but Tico tut-tutted every time we passed a coconut palm), and even more pleasure in skipping up the 990m Pico do Papagaio while I lumbered behind.