Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To play upon; mock; deceive with false hopes.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To play upon by artifice; to deceive; to mock; to excite and disappoint the hopes of.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb literary to delude, fool

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin illūdō.

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Examples

Comments

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  • ...Not accepted on "Words with friends" (Scrabble-like application for iPhone). :-(

    February 17, 2010

  • Oh! Is it my turn?

    February 17, 2010

  • Must be. I've never played.

    February 17, 2010

  • I confess I am terrible at Scrabble. I can't just play random words worth a zillion points like many do. My S.O. says it's because I look for pretty words instead. Which is flattering, but probably false.

    February 17, 2010

  • When I play Scrabble with my friends, we keep all our tiles visible to everybody so that we can play cooperatively; scoring is based on subjective decisions about the prettiness of the word. Essential aim is to make the most interesting board possible.

    February 17, 2010

  • That's how it should be!

    February 17, 2010

  • I used to play a lot of Scrabble with graduate students in creative writing (poets). I had one friend who kept score by writing down each word played, rather than the word's worth. I had another friend who was always sharing strange new words found in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, but wasn't very good at finding places to play those words on the board.

    When I started playing, I hated to keep score and searched for wonderful words only. But I've found that something interesting happens when you play for points. When you begin to strategize--memorizing the 2-letter words, holding on to the Q until there's a Triple Letter Score--suddenly the words become more interesting because of the context of how they're placed on the board. You begin to move from free verse into the realm of the.... Well, I was going to say sonnet, but I suppose it's more of an obsessive sestina (which Wordnik tells us is worth just 7 points, but which, if played using all the tiles in your rack, and then through a Triple Word Score, can be a thing of rare beauty).

    February 17, 2010

  • Sometimes ruzuzu scares me.

    February 17, 2010

  • *grins*

    Thanks, bilby!

    February 17, 2010

  • Ruzuzu, on a triple word score, would be worth 42 points. This means that she herself is a thing of rare beauty. It also means that she'll have trouble building up momentum.

    February 18, 2010

  • Oh, no! Not during the Olympics!

    February 18, 2010

  • We could strap her to a sled and shove her down a mountain.

    *is feeling helpful*

    February 18, 2010

  • Pterodactyl, thank you! I saw a horse on la playa today, after I ate some fresh pineapple. I did not ask to join the folks who were playing Scrabble at another table.

    February 18, 2010

  • I should note for those of you playing along at home that there are references here to Dara Torres, etc. See, e.g., 42.

    March 1, 2015