dizzy [OE] In Old English dizzy meant ‘foolish’. The medieval sense ‘having a whirling feeling in the head’ led to ‘scatterbrained’ and in late 19th-century USA to the dizzy *blonde. In the 20th century the US novelist Dashiell Hammett defined the stereotype when he wrote of ‘A dizzy blonde that likes men and fun and hasn’t got much sense’. The blonde who had been dizzy from the 1870s became *dumb in the 1930s.