Felony

How to spell felony

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce felony

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does felony mean?

1. nounA serious crime, such as murder or armed robbery, treated in law as more grave than a minor offence.

Felony in a sentence

• The prosecutor charged him with a felony rather than a minor offence.

• A conviction for felony can bar a person from certain jobs for life.

Where does felony come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English from Old French felonie, meaning 'wickedness', 'treachery', or 'a serious crime', which was built on the noun felon, a term for a villain or traitor. The French word descended from the Medieval Latin fello or fellonem, whose ultimate origin is genuinely murky; scholars have proposed everything from a root meaning 'one who deceives' to a Germanic source, but none is certain. English adopted it in the 1200s and 1300s, originally with a strong moral flavour of treachery and base wickedness rather than the modern legal one. Over time the law absorbed it as a precise label for the gravest category of crime, those once punishable by forfeiture of land and goods, sitting above lesser offences. The single 'l' and the soft, unstressed second syllable (fel-OH-nee swallowed to fel-uh-nee) are the spelling traps, since the schwa gives no clue to the vowel.

How the word is built

• felon (wicked person, serious offender)
• -y (noun-forming suffix denoting a state or category)