A historical or archaic plural form or variant related to 'foil,' or a dialectal form of 'fools' in some English variants.
Likely from Old French or Middle English variants of 'foil,' 'fool,' or related terms. The spelling represents older conventions before modern English standardization.
Words like 'folles' remind us that English spelling wasn't standardized until the 18th century—before that, the same word could be spelled a dozen different ways depending on the scribe's whim or regional accent.
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