feint

UK/feɪnt/US/feɪnt/

nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,883 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: feints

A feint is a move made to draw an opponent the wrong way. A clever feint, feint left, a feint before the strike.

It works by being believable enough to commit the other person, which is why the best feint costs the maker almost nothing and the receiver their balance. It is standard in boxing, fencing and football. Note the spelling — feint, not faint — and that feint-ruled paper is the same word, meaning faintly printed.

Definitions of feint

1nounfeintA move made to draw an opponent the wrong way.C1
“The boxer made a feint with his left hand and then hit with his right.”

feint is a deceptive move.

Where it comes from

French feinte comes from feindre, to feign, from Latin fingere, to shape or invent. Fiction, figure and feign come from the same shaping.

Proto-Indo-European
*dʰeyǵʰ-
Latin
fingere
Old French
feindre
French
feinte — dummy, feint
English, today
feint

Built from

feindre · French — to fake, feign
fingō · Latin — to alter the truth to deceive, dissemble, feign, pretend; to fashion, form, shape

The noun is borrowed from French feinte (“dummy, feint”), from feindre (“to fake, feign”), from Old French feindre, faindre, from Latin fingere, the present active infinitive of fingō (“to alter the truth to deceive, dissemble, feign, pretend; to fashion, form, shape”). The verb is derived from the noun. 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

feint in the wild

The lines often are printed with fine width and in light colour and such paper is sometimes called feint-ruled paper.
Ruled paper
A feint is achieved by giving the impression that a certain maneuver will take place, while in fact another, or even none, will.
Feint
In military tactics and many types of combat, there are two types of feints: feint attacks and feint retreats.
Feint
While the Secretary of the Army declared the feint prevented the reinforcement of the San Juan Heights, no evidence was found to support this claim.
Battle of the Aguadores
The fact that the feint was named after Cruyff, however, does not mean that Cruyff was the first to perform this move.
Cruyff turn

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the fingō family

figure

feint — used about once every 7,462 pages · #10,883 · point at the bar for the others

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