Fatigue

How to spell fatigue

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fatigue

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fatigue mean?

1. nounExtreme tiredness resulting from exertion, illness, or lack of rest.
2. nounWeakening of a material, such as metal, caused by repeated stress over time.
3. verbTo cause extreme tiredness in a person or to weaken a material through stress.

Fatigue in a sentence

• noun

  By the end of the night shift she could barely fight off the fatigue.

• noun

  Inspectors traced the crack in the bridge to metal fatigue.

• verb

  Such a punishing schedule will quickly fatigue even the fittest staff.

• noun

  Chronic fatigue left him struggling to concentrate at work.

• noun

  The aircraft wing was tested for fatigue after thousands of flights.

• verb

  Constant bending can fatigue the metal until it finally snaps.

Where does fatigue come from?

Language of origin: French

English took this word directly from the French fatigue, a noun formed from the verb fatiguer, meaning 'to tire' or 'to wear out'. The French verb in turn descended from the Latin fatigare, which literally meant 'to weary, to exhaust, or to drive to the point of breaking down'. The word arrived in English in the seventeenth century, first as a verb meaning to tire someone out and soon afterwards as a noun for the state of being worn down. The same French ancestry explains the spelling trap: the cluster '-gue' at the end is purely French, where the 'u' merely props up the hard 'g' sound and the final 'e' is silent, the same pattern seen in 'vague' and 'plague'. Over time the noun gathered specialist uses too, including the weakening of metals under repeated stress and the heavy manual chores once assigned to soldiers, which is why their work clothing came to be called fatigues.

How the word is built

• fatig- (from Latin fatigare: to weary, tire out)
• -ue (French spelling of the silent-g ending)