Capable of being fooled or deceived; easily tricked or made to believe something false.
From the prefix 'be-' (to make or cause to be) combined with 'fool' (from Old French 'fol', meaning stupid person) and the suffix '-able' (capable of). The word structure emerged in Middle English as a productive way to describe susceptibility to fooling.
This word shows how English loves to add 'be-' to verbs to intensify or transform them—'befool' means to actively fool someone, and 'befoolable' marks a person as vulnerable to that action. It's a cousin to words like 'believable' and 'doable,' following the same ancient recipe for building adjectives.
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