Frat

How to spell frat

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce frat

What does frat mean?

1. nounA college fraternity, especially a male student social or residential society, or its members and culture.

Frat in a sentence

• He joined a frat during his first year at the state university.

• The noise from the frat house kept the whole street awake on weekends.

Where does frat come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a casual clipping of fraternity, which itself descends from the Latin fraternitas, meaning 'brotherhood' or 'the bond between brothers', built on frater, the ordinary Latin word for 'brother'. English took fraternity through Old French in the 1300s, originally for a religious or trade brotherhood, and by the 1800s it had attached itself to the all-male social and residential societies of North American colleges. The slangy short form frat appeared in American student speech in the later nineteenth century, the same way many campus words get trimmed for everyday use. Because it simply lops off the tail of a longer word, the spelling is short and phonetic, and the only thing to remember is that it ends in a single t, matching the t at the heart of frater. The same frater root still shows up in 'fraternal', 'fraternise', and even 'friar', a monk addressed as 'brother'.

How the word is built

• clipped form of fraternity: frater (Latin: brother)
• -ity (noun suffix), shortened to frat