Feds

How to spell feds

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce feds

What does feds mean?

1. nounInformal term for federal law-enforcement agents or federal government authorities, especially in the United States.

Feds in a sentence

• The feds raided the warehouse before dawn and seized the documents.

• According to the report, the feds had been tracking the fraud for months.

Where does feds come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is an informal clipping of 'federal', a word that traces back to the Latin foedus, meaning 'covenant', 'league', or 'treaty', whose underlying sense was a binding pact between parties. From foedus came the Latin stem foeder-, which produced the adjective foederalis describing matters of an alliance or league of states. English adopted 'federal' in the seventeenth century, and it became central to the political vocabulary of the United States, where federal agencies and their agents loomed large in everyday life. By the twentieth century Americans had shortened 'federal agent' or 'federal authorities' to the breezy 'fed', and the plural 'feds' took hold in journalism, crime fiction, and casual speech. The spelling is simply the clipped root plus a plural -s, so the trap is remembering it stays lowercase and short rather than being respelled.

How the word is built

• fed (clipping of federal, from Latin foedus: covenant, treaty)
• -s (plural)