Etymology

doofus

D2O1O1F4U1S1

Today it means: A person with poor judgment and taste; a foolish or silly person. Full definition →

Scots doof
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The story

  1. Scots · derived fromdoof“simpleton”
  2. English todaydoofus

Pseudo-Latinism, possibly an alteration of earlier goofus (first attested in the 1920s) due to influence from Scots doof (“simpleton”). Scots doof is derived from Low German doof (“deaf”, with a secondary sense of “idiotic, stupid”). The Low German word is cognate with English deaf. By surface analysis, doof + Latin -us. Some have proposed that dupe possibly played some kind of role in the development of doofus as well.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.