Fighter

How to spell fighter

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fighter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fighter mean?

1. nounA person who takes part in physical combat, especially a boxer or martial artist.
2. nounA fast military aircraft designed for attacking other aircraft.
3. nounA person who shows great determination in the face of difficulty.

Fighter in a sentence

• The young fighter trained for months before his first professional bout.

• The enemy fighter streaked across the sky at supersonic speed.

• Despite the grim diagnosis, she proved to be a real fighter.

• Every fighter on the card weighed in the night before the match.

• Each fighter was armed with missiles and a rapid-fire cannon.

• His refusal to give up marked him as a natural fighter.

Where does fighter come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the native Old English verb feohtan, meaning 'to fight, to do battle', combined with the old agent suffix -ere, which formed nouns for a person who performs an action. It is a thoroughly Germanic word, with close cousins in Dutch vechter and German Fechter, all tracing back to a common ancestor that meant something like 'to strive or strike'. The puzzling 'gh' in the spelling is a fossil: it once stood for a rough, throaty consonant sound (similar to the 'ch' in Scottish 'loch') that English speakers pronounced in words like fight, night, and light. Over the centuries that sound faded from speech but the letters stubbornly remained on the page, which is exactly why the silent 'gh' still traps writers today. The figurative sense of a 'fighter' as a determined, resilient person developed later, extending the original idea of literal combat.

How the word is built

• fight (root verb: to struggle or do battle)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)