Fight

How to spell fight

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fight

What does fight mean?

1. verbTo take part in a physical, verbal, or determined struggle against someone or something.
2. nounA physical or verbal struggle, contest, or determined effort.

Fight in a sentence

• verb

  The two brothers used to fight over the television remote every evening.

• noun

  The boxing fight was scheduled for twelve rounds on Saturday.

• verb

  Doctors worked through the night to fight the spread of the infection.

• noun

  After a brief fight about money, the couple agreed to share the bills.

Where does fight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Fight descends from the Old English verb feohtan, meaning 'to combat, contend, or do battle', a word already in everyday use among Anglo-Saxon speakers long before the Norman Conquest. It belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close cousins in the Old High German fehtan and the modern German fechten 'to fence', so the idea of armed struggle runs through the whole branch. The 'gh' in the spelling is a fossil: it once represented a throaty consonant sound (rather like the ch in Scottish 'loch') that English speakers gradually stopped pronouncing, leaving the letters silent. The matching noun, from Old English feoht, developed alongside the verb and broadened over the centuries from literal physical combat to any contest, argument, or determined effort. Because the rough consonant fell silent, the modern spelling preserves a 'gh' that the ear no longer hears, which is exactly why it feels like a trap.

How the word is built

• fight (from Old English feohtan: to combat), one indivisible root with no productive prefix or suffix