What does “дурить голову” mean in Russian?

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B1 Russian listening practice · Standard Russian · Curated for intermediate learners

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дурить голову (durit' golovu)
Russian body-part idiom
“to mess someone around, mess with someone’s head”; to confuse or mislead them

Дурить голову means to mess someone around or mess with their head: to confuse or mislead them, give them the runaround, or waste their time. Literally it’s “to fool the head,” and the person being fooled goes in the dative, so не дури мне голову is “stop messing me around.” It’s colloquial and a little rough, the kind of thing you snap in an argument rather than say politely.

In the clip a customer complains that the coffee shop across the street charges 80 roubles, not 90, and the barista snaps back: Так иди в кофейню через дорогу. Что ты голову дуришь? Here что is literally “what,” but in this kind of conversational question English naturally uses “why”: Что ты кричишь? = “Why are you shouting?” So the line is “Then go there. Why are you messing me around?” The punchline follows: the complainer owns that shop across the street, out scouting the competition. A close cousin is морочить голову, with almost the same meaning. For a more slangy version, Russian also has пудрить мозги, literally “to powder someone’s brains.”

Vocabulary frequency

How common is the vocabulary in this B1 Russian listening practice listening practice?

94.4%
of words are in the top 2,000 most common Russian words
Based on this reel’s transcript, most of the vocabulary is high-frequency, everyday Russian.

General Russian frequency

86.1%
Top 1,000
94.4%
Top 2,000
100%
Top 5,000

Spoken Russian frequency

97.1%
Top 1,000
97.1%
Top 2,000
100%
Top 5,000

Words above this video’s level

Quick glosses for vocabulary that goes beyond this video’s B1 level.

возмутительно
1×
Rare / outside top 5,000
outrageously
дуришь
1×
Rare / outside top 5,000
кофейне
1×
Rare / outside top 5,000
кофейни
1×
Rare / outside top 5,000
кофейню
1×
Rare / outside top 5,000
голову дуришь
1×
to confuse or mislead someone

Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · OpenSubtitles 2018 (HermitDave) (spoken). Buckets approximate; exact ranks not stored.

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