Fist
nounA hand closed tightly with the fingers bent into the palm.
How to spell fist
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce fist
What does fist mean?
- nounA hand closed tightly with the fingers bent into the palm.
Fist in a sentence
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He banged his fist on the table to demand quiet.
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She clenched her fist in frustration at the delay.
Where does fist come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Fist comes from the Old English word fȳst, meaning a clenched hand, and it has cousins right across the Germanic family, including the Dutch vuist and the German Faust. Scholars trace these forms back to a prehistoric West Germanic root that may itself stretch back to an ancient word connected with the number five, the idea being the five fingers gathered together into one grip. The spelling has stayed remarkably steady, though the vowel sound shifted from a longer 'oo'-like quality in older English to the short 'i' we use now. The legendary character Faust shares this exact root, his name literally meaning 'fist'. Because the word is short and entirely phonetic, it rarely troubles writers, which is one of the reasons it has survived intact for well over a thousand years.
How the word is built
- fist (from Old English fȳst: clenched hand), a single native root with no affixes
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