Fact

How to spell fact

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fact

What does fact mean?

1. nounA piece of information known or proven to be true.

Fact in a sentence

• The report stated every fact in plain language.

• She checked each fact against the original records before publishing.

Where does fact come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin factum, meaning 'a thing done' or 'a deed', which was the neuter past participle of facere, 'to do' or 'to make'. When it first entered English in the early 1500s it carried that older sense of an action or deed, so 'an evil fact' simply meant an evil act. Over the following century the meaning drifted from the deed itself toward the certainty that the deed had genuinely happened, and so to its modern sense of something known to be true. The same facere root sits behind a large family of English words, including 'factory', 'manufacture', 'affect' and 'satisfaction'. Because the spelling preserves the original Latin stem so cleanly, it offers no real trap; the silent struggle is only in remembering its older legal echo, which survives in the phrase 'after the fact'.

How the word is built

• fact (from Latin factum: a thing done); a complete root with no affixes in English