Spelling.School · How to spell

How to spell foil

hear itfoil/fɔɪl/nounLong vowels

What it means: A light sword with a flexible blade used in fencing.

In a sentence: The knight used a shiny foil to duel his opponent.

The part people get wrong

Often misspelled as foyl or foile.

Same family: hydrofoil, foilboard, foil-borne, foiling (as a noun for the activity), foil design. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: This technical sense of "foil" comes from the idea of a thin leaf or plate, related to an older meaning of "foil" as a thin sheet of metal. In water sports and naval engineering, the word was adapted to describe plate-like shapes that create lift as they move through water.

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