Fiasco

How to spell fiasco

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce fiasco

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fiasco mean?

1. nounA complete and often embarrassing failure of a plan, event, or undertaking.

Fiasco in a sentence

• The product launch turned into a costly fiasco when the website crashed.

• The office party was a fiasco, with the caterer arriving three hours late.

Where does fiasco come from?

Language of origin: Italian

Fiasco came into English in the middle of the 1800s straight from Italian, where the word literally means 'flask' or 'bottle'. The leap from a glass bottle to a humiliating failure runs through the Italian theatrical phrase 'fare fiasco', literally 'to make a bottle', which described an actor or performer making a complete mess of a show. Several explanations for the bottle image have been offered, including the idea of a glassblower bungling fine work and being left with only a plain flask, though none is certain, so the exact path of the metaphor is debated. What is clear is that English borrowed the figurative sense, a total and often embarrassing breakdown of plans, and largely ignored the literal flask meaning. The same Italian root also lies behind 'flask' itself, which reached English by a separate, older route. The single c and the unusual 'ia' opening are the chief spelling snares, both pointing back to the word's intact Italian form.

How the word is built

• fiasco (Italian: flask, bottle), used whole; no prefix or suffix in English