Foe

How to spell foe

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce foe

What does foe mean?

1. nounAn enemy or adversary; a person who opposes or fights against another.

Foe in a sentence

• The old general treated every rival as a personal foe.

• In the negotiations he came to see his former partner as a foe.

Where does foe come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Foe comes from the Old English noun fah or gefa, meaning 'an enemy' or 'one who is hostile', and it traces back to a Germanic root tied to hatred and feuding. The same ancestry gives us the related word 'feud', which originally described an ongoing state of hostility between families. In its earliest use the word also worked as an adjective meaning 'hostile' or 'at war', before settling into the plain noun sense of an opponent or adversary. The spelling drifted over the centuries: the Old English 'fah' lost its harsh consonant and gained the 'oe' ending that survives today, much as 'toe' and 'doe' did. That quiet 'oe' spelling is the only real trap, since the word is pronounced simply as 'fo'. The literary pairing 'friend or foe' has kept the word in steady use long after most of its Old English cousins faded.

How the word is built

• foe (a single Old English root meaning 'enemy'; no prefix or suffix)