silly
/ˈsɪli
/- It was silly, extremely foolish and childish of me.
- Yes, it is all a bit familiar - but, sadly, nowhere near as delightfully absurd and unrepentantly silly as the Ghostbusters movies.
- We are frail, we are human, we make mistakes, we do foolish things, silly things.
Synonyms
- Brainball may seem like a ridiculously silly game, but it demonstrates how a machine can know something about your emotional state.
- It's a deeply silly and trivial entertainment cheerfully devoid of any nutritional or calorific value whatever.
- Ack, it sounds so silly and trivial now, but I was literally shaking with rage at the time.
Synonyms
- But she still worried herself silly every time a visit was coming up.
- He drank himself silly and had to take a cab home.
Synonyms
- She is silly, helpless, Irish, very poor, and 28 years of age.
- Illingworth was content with two short legs, silly mid-on, slip and gulley as he wheeled away for less than one run an over.
- Ian Bell, surrounded by a slip, gully, short leg and captain Ricky Ponting at silly mid-off, became Warne's second lbw victim for eight.
- Sourav Ganguly, once legendarily dismissive of spinners but now woefully out of form, was dropped by Younis Khan at silly mid-off.
- Quit interrupting the news bulletin in that infuriating manner when you don't actually have any results at all to hand, sillies.
- Then he says huitlacoche is corn fungus, not a nervous breakdown, sillies.
- Apparently, 1/3 of American men have not had a checkup in the past year, you sillies.
Synonyms
Phrases
the silly season
Derivatives
sillily
- The custom involved a group ‘simply or sillily and without ceremony or introduction’ walking into people's houses to check if the clock was in good repair.
- I then realised I actually quite like the police station, with its spiralling steps, and bizarre platforms on sillily long stilts.
- They were rather sillily teaching them how to do it for each other.
Origin
Late Middle English (in the sense 'deserving of pity or sympathy'): alteration of dialect seely 'happy', later 'innocent, feeble', from a West Germanic base meaning 'luck, happiness'. The sense 'foolish' developed via the stages 'feeble' and 'unsophisticated, ignorant'.
A medieval Englishman would have been pleased if you described him as silly—you would have been saying he was happy or lucky. The word is an alteration of earlier seely, from an ancient root meaning ‘luck, happiness’. The Old English sense of seely was ‘happy, fortunate, blessed by God’. This subsequently developed into ‘holy’, then ‘innocent, defenceless, deserving of pity’, at which point, in the later Middle Ages, silly largely took over. Cynical people often regard goodness and simplicity as showing a lack of intelligence, and since the late 16th century the primary sense has been ‘foolish’. In cricket, silly is used in the names of fielding positions such as silly mid-off and silly point, to indicate that the fielder is positioned closer than usual to the batsman. What makes such positions ‘silly’ is that the fielder is required to stand perilously close to the bat. In high summer wealthy and important people deserted Victorian London while Parliament and the law courts were in recess. Since the mid 19th century the months of July and August have been the silly season, when British newspapers often print trivia because of a lack of important news. The first silly billy was either William Frederick, the Duke of Gloucester (1776–1834), or King William IV (1765–1837). William IV, the predecessor of Queen Victoria, became unpopular when he intervened in politics by imposing the Conservative Robert Peel as prime minister, despite a Whig majority in Parliament.