Fee

How to spell fee

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fee

What does fee mean?

1. nounA fixed sum of money charged or paid for a service, privilege, or membership.
2. nounIn property law, an inherited or heritable estate in land, as in 'fee simple'.

Fee in a sentence

• The bank waived the monthly account fee for new customers.

• The deed transferred the land to her in absolute fee simple.

• Each lawyer sets a different hourly fee for consultations.

• The manor had been held in fee by the same family for centuries.

Where does fee come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word goes back to the Old English feoh, which literally meant 'cattle' and, by extension, 'movable property, wealth, or money', because in early Germanic society livestock was the chief measure of wealth. It shares a common Germanic ancestor with the modern German Vieh 'cattle' and is even related, far back, to the Latin pecus 'flock', the same root that gives us 'pecuniary'. As the feudal system took hold after the Norman Conquest, the native word blended with the Anglo-Norman fee (from medieval Latin feodum or feudum), which described an estate of land held in return for service to a lord; this is the source of legal phrases like 'fee simple'. From that idea of something owed or held came the everyday modern sense of a fixed charge or payment for a service. The spelling settled into the short, tidy form 'fee' by the late Middle Ages, with the double 'e' simply marking the long vowel sound.

How the word is built

• fee (single root; from Old English feoh: cattle, property, money)