Fab

How to spell fab

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fab

What does fab mean?

1. adjectiveInformal term meaning wonderful or excellent.

Fab in a sentence

• The hotel was fab and the staff could not have been kinder.

• She thought the new restaurant looked absolutely fab.

Where does fab come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a clipped, informal form of 'fabulous', which itself goes back to the Latin fabulosus, meaning 'celebrated in fable' or 'mythical', built on fabula, a 'story' or 'tale' (the same root that gives us 'fable'). Over the centuries fabulous drifted from 'belonging to legend' to simply 'astonishingly good', and by the mid twentieth century British slang trimmed it to the snappy 'fab'. The shortening took hold in the early 1960s and was famously attached to the Beatles, who were nicknamed the Fab Four. A quite separate technical use, where 'fab' means a semiconductor fabrication plant, arose later as a clipping of 'fabrication' rather than 'fabulous'. Because the word is just three letters with no silent traps, it is one of the easiest spellings in English, and its only real curiosity is how far it has travelled from a Latin word for a fairy tale.

How the word is built

• shortened from fabulous: fab(ulous), clipped to the first syllable