Fury

How to spell fury

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fury

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fury mean?

1. nounWild or violent anger.

Fury in a sentence

• He slammed the door in a sudden fury.

• The email was written in a moment of fury and she later regretted it.

Where does fury come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Fury comes from the Latin furia, meaning 'rage' or 'frenzy', which was built on the verb furere, literally 'to rage' or 'to be mad'. The Romans also personified these furiae as the Furies, the avenging spirits of myth who hounded wrongdoers, so the word carried a sense of relentless, almost supernatural anger from early on. It travelled into English in the late 1300s through Old French furie, keeping both the meaning of violent personal anger and the milder sense of great force or intensity. The same furere root sits behind 'furious' and 'furore', which is a useful reminder that the spelling keeps the 'fur' opening rather than the 'fer' you might expect from the sound. Because the word is short and the stressed vowel is clear, the spelling is fairly stable, with the main wobble being whether to add an extra letter before the final -y.

How the word is built

• fur- (from Latin furere: to rage)
• -y (noun-forming suffix)