Fiat

How to spell fiat

4 letters · 2 syllables

10 of the 20 people asked to spell fiat in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is fiet. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

fiet fiat

What people typed instead

• fiet5 people

How to pronounce fiat

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fiat mean?

1. nounAn authoritative order or decision that takes effect simply because someone in power commands it.
2. nounUsed of money that has value because a government declares it legal tender, not because it is backed by a physical commodity such as gold.

Fiat in a sentence

• The new rules were imposed by fiat rather than through any vote.

• Modern central banks issue fiat currency that is not tied to gold reserves.

• The committee resented having its budget cut by managerial fiat.

• Economists debated whether fiat money could hold its value during the crisis.

Where does fiat come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is one of the rare English words that is a complete Latin verb form sitting unchanged in the language. Fiat is the third person singular present subjunctive of fieri, the passive of facere, which meant 'to make' or 'to do', so the word literally means 'let it be done' or 'let it be made'. It is most famous from the Latin Bible's account of creation, 'fiat lux', usually rendered 'let there be light', where a thing comes into being purely because authority commands it. English adopted it in the 1600s, first as a formal term for an authoritative order or sanction, and the modern financial sense of 'fiat money' grew from the same idea: currency that has value only because a government decrees that it does. Because the word is borrowed whole and never anglicised, its spelling stays plain and short, with the slightly surprising trap being the simple vowel run 'fia' rather than any silent or doubled letters.

How the word is built

• fiat (Latin: let it be done, from facere: to make or do)

People who misspell fiat also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got fiat wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• connoisseur 100% of them got it wrong