Fault

How to spell fault

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fault

What does fault mean?

1. nounResponsibility for an error or problem, or a flaw or imperfection in something.
2. nounA fracture in the earth's crust where blocks of rock have shifted relative to each other.
3. nounA serve that lands outside the valid area or breaks a rule, counting against the server.
4. verbTo criticise someone or find a flaw in their actions or work.

Fault in a sentence

• noun

  The missed deadline was entirely my fault.

• noun

  The city sits directly above a major seismic fault.

• noun

  Her first serve was a fault, so she had one attempt left.

• verb

  No one could fault her handling of the crisis.

• noun

  The engineer traced the power cut to a fault in the wiring.

• noun

  Geologists mapped the fault running beneath the valley.

Where does fault come from?

Language of origin: French

This word reaches English through Old French faute, meaning a lack, a failing, or a deficiency, which itself developed from an unrecorded Vulgar Latin form fallita, built on the Latin verb fallere, meaning 'to deceive' or 'to fail'. The earliest English sense, from around 1300, was simply a shortcoming or a defect, the idea of something that falls short of what it should be. From that root grew the modern senses of blame for a wrongdoing, a flaw in an object, and a crack in the earth's crust. The same Latin fallere also gave English 'false', 'fail', and 'fallacy', all sharing the notion of falling away from the truth or the mark. The silent 'l' is the spelling trap: Old French spelled the word 'faute' without an 'l', and English scribes later reinserted it to echo the Latin original, even though most speakers do pronounce it.

How the word is built

• fault (from Latin fallere: to deceive, to fail), via Old French faute