Fallout

How to spell fallout

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fallout

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fallout mean?

1. nounThe unpleasant after-effects or repercussions of an action or event.
2. nounRadioactive particles carried in the air and deposited on the ground after a nuclear explosion.

Fallout in a sentence

• The political fallout from the scandal lasted for months.

• The bunker was designed to protect families from radioactive fallout.

• Managers are still dealing with the fallout of the failed merger.

• Scientists measured the fallout that drifted across the region after the test.

Where does fallout come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Fallout is a transparent compound built from the ordinary English verb 'fall', a native Old English word (feallan, meaning to drop or descend), and the adverb 'out'. As a single noun it is surprisingly modern, emerging in the late 1940s and especially the 1950s to name the radioactive particles that 'fall out' of the atmosphere after a nuclear explosion. From that grim Cold War origin the word quickly broadened into a figurative sense covering the unpleasant after-effects or repercussions of any event. Both parts are everyday words, so the only real spelling question is whether to write it as one word, two words, or with a hyphen; the closed single-word form 'fallout' is now the standard noun. Because it grew out of the phrasal verb 'fall out' (to quarrel, or to drop loose), keeping that image in mind helps fix the meaning and the spelling.

How the word is built

• fall (to descend)
• out (away, downward) [a noun formed from the phrasal verb 'fall out']