Fiend

How to spell fiend

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fiend

What does fiend mean?

1. nounA demon or evil spirit, or a person of extreme cruelty or wickedness.
2. nounA person devoted to a particular activity or thing to an excessive degree.

Fiend in a sentence

• The horror film cast a clawed fiend as its central villain.

• As a fitness fiend, she trains before dawn every single day.

• The old legend describes a clawed fiend haunting the forest.

• My brother is a coffee fiend who grinds his own beans at home.

Where does fiend come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English feond, which originally meant simply 'an enemy' and was the ordinary word for any foe or adversary. It belongs to the wider Germanic family and is closely related to the modern German Feind, also meaning 'enemy'; the form began as the present participle of an old verb meaning 'to hate', so a feond was literally 'the one hating'. Over the medieval period the sense narrowed and darkened, so that by the time of Middle English it referred above all to the supreme enemy of mankind, the Devil, and then to any demon or evil spirit. From there it broadened again to describe a cruel or wicked person, and later still, in a lighter modern twist, an obsessive enthusiast such as a fresh-air fiend. The spelling keeps the i-before-e pattern of its Old English root, and that ie order is the small trap worth fixing in memory.

How the word is built

• fiend (single root, from Old English feond 'enemy'); no prefix or suffix