Fest

How to spell fest

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fest

What does fest mean?

1. nounAn informal festival or event centred on a particular activity or theme.

Fest in a sentence

• The local food fest drew crowds from across the county.

• The studio hosted a weekend horror fest for film buffs.

Where does fest come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This little word comes from the German Fest, meaning 'festival' or 'celebration', which itself traces back to the Latin festum, a religious feast or holiday. English speakers first borrowed it as a combining suffix in the late 1800s, attaching it to other words to coin breezy names for gatherings devoted to one theme, as in 'songfest' and 'gabfest'. Over time the ending broke free and began standing on its own as a casual noun simply meaning a festival or an event packed with one kind of activity. The Latin festum is the same root that gives us 'feast', 'festive', and 'festival', so the celebratory sense has stayed remarkably constant across centuries. Because it is short and phonetic, the spelling holds no real surprise; the only thing to remember is that it ends in a single 't' with no silent extras.

How the word is built

• fest (from German Fest: festival, celebration), now used as a standalone informal noun and a combining form