Meaning

Foolishness that results from a lack of foresight or lack of practicality..

Definitions by Sense

1. Foolishness that results from a lack of foresight or lack of practicality.
2. Thoughtless action resulting in tragic consequence.
3. (architecture) A fanciful building built for purely ornamental reasons.
4. (dialectal) To follow.
5. (largely obsolete outside place names) A clump of trees, particularly one on the crest of a hill (or sometimes on a stretch of open ground).

Example Sentences

It would be folly to walk all that way, knowing the shops are probably shut by now.

With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly.

The purchase of Alaska from Russia was termed Seward's folly.

Thames Water has become the latest object lesson in the predictable and predicted folly of privatised monopolies, aided by a regulator that’s an even bigger wet wipe than the fatbergs bunging up the sewers.

A luncheonette in the shape of a coffee cup is particularly conspicuous, as is intended of an architectural duck or folly.

“The Villa Straylight,” said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, “is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. […]”

It has been a long time since new follies were springing up across the great estates of Britain. But the owners of Doddington Hall, in Lincolnshire, have brought the folly into the 21st century, by building a 30ft pyramid in the grounds of the Elizabethan manor.

A great deal of eccentricity was expressed through the trend for ruin follies. But it wasn’t only the madness of paranoid earls and fashionable landowners that was encoded in them.

Word Forms

• follies
• follying
• follied

Synonyms for folly

Antonyms for folly

Related Words

When Should You Use Folly?

Use folly when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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