Other forms: foxes
A fox is a clever wild animal with red fur and a bushy tail. A red fox, urban foxes, sly as a fox.
Urban foxes are now commoner in British cities than in much of the countryside, and they live at higher densities there because food is easier. The reputation for cunning is ancient and cross-cultural. As a verb, to fox somebody is to baffle them. Note foxglove; foxed, of book pages spotted brown; and that the Proto-Indo-European root may mean the tailed one.
1nounfoxA wild animal with red fur and a bushy tail.
“A fox got into the garden last night and knocked over the bins.”
2verbbaffleTo baffle somebody.
“The last question in the quiz foxed everybody.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
fox is an animal.
Old English fox goes back to a root that may mean the tailed one, from a word for a tail. The animal is named for its most obvious feature.
Middle English
fox
English, today
fox
Built from
From Middle English fox. From Middle English fox, from Old English fox (“fox”), from Proto-West Germanic fuhs, from Proto-Germanic fuhsaz (“fox”), from Proto-Indo-European púḱsos (“the tailed one”), possibly from puḱ- (“tail”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA