Fat

How to spell fat

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fat

What does fat mean?

1. adjectiveHaving a large amount of excess flesh or body weight.
2. nounThe oily or greasy substance found in animal bodies and many foods.

Fat in a sentence

• adjective

  The vet warned that the cat had grown too fat for its own health.

• noun

  She trimmed the fat from the steak before grilling it.

• adjective

  A fat wallet stuffed with cash bulged in his back pocket.

• noun

  The recipe calls for very little fat to keep the dish light.

Where does fat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word fat comes from Old English faett, an adjective describing something well-fed, plump, or rich, and it traces back through the older Germanic word that gave related forms in Dutch (vet) and German (fett). The original sense was tied to the idea of being filled out or fattened, which is why early uses applied equally to animals being raised for slaughter and to soil that was rich and fertile. Over time the adjective spawned a noun for the greasy substance found in animal and plant tissue, a development already settled in English by the medieval period. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable because the word is short, native, and phonetically transparent: three letters that map directly onto three sounds. That simplicity is exactly why fat almost never trips up a writer, since there is no silent letter or hidden vowel to forget.

How the word is built

• fat (a single Old English root meaning well-fed or plump; no prefix or suffix)