Fated

How to spell fated

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fated mean?

1. adjectiveDetermined or controlled in advance by destiny, often heading toward an unhappy or unavoidable outcome.

Fated in a sentence

• The badly funded project seemed fated to fail from the start.

• The two business partners felt they were fated to meet on that flight.

Where does fated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows from the Latin fatum, which literally meant 'that which has been spoken', taken from the verb fari, 'to speak'. In Roman thought the gods pronounced a person's destiny aloud, so a spoken decree hardened into the idea of an unchangeable fortune. English absorbed 'fate' through Old French in the late 1300s, and the participial adjective 'fated', meaning 'set down by destiny' or 'doomed', followed soon after. The very same fatum root sits inside 'fatal' and 'fairy', and even the word 'fame' shares the sense of 'something spoken'. Because there is only one t in the bare noun fate, writers should remember that 'fated' keeps that single t rather than doubling it, and that it is a separate word from 'fetted' or the accented 'feted'.

How the word is built

• fate (destiny, from Latin fatum)
• -ed (adjective-forming past participle suffix)