Faith

How to spell faith

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce faith

What does faith mean?

1. nounComplete trust or confidence in someone or something, or a strong religious belief.

Faith in a sentence

• She kept her faith in the project despite the early setbacks.

• The contract was signed in good faith by both parties.

Where does faith come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes ultimately from the Latin fides, which meant 'trust', 'confidence' or 'belief', and which also gave us 'fidelity' and the dog name 'Fido'. It travelled into English through Old French, where the form was 'feid' or 'fei', and it appears in early Middle English around the 1200s as 'feith'. The unusual spelling with -th developed in English partly by analogy with other abstract nouns such as 'truth' and 'health', which is why the borrowed French word ended up looking native. Early uses were strongly religious, denoting belief in God, but the broader sense of trust in a person or promise was present from the start. That same fides root sits inside 'confide', 'fiance' and 'bona fide', which all share the underlying idea of trusting.

How the word is built

• faith (from Latin fides: trust, belief), entered English as a single unanalysable root with no productive prefix or suffix