fiasco
Americannoun
-
fiascos,
plural
-
fiascoes
plural
-
a complete and ignominious failure.
- Synonyms:
- bomb, flop, debacle, catastrophe, disaster
-
a round-bottomed glass flask for wine, especially Chianti, fitted with a woven, protective raffia basket that also enables the bottle to stand upright.
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of fiasco
1850–55; < Italian: literally, bottle < Germanic ( see flask 1); sense “failure” from Italian phrase far fiasco to fail, literally, to make a bottle, idiom of uncertain origin
Explanation
A fiasco is a disaster. It's not a natural disaster — like an earthquake or a volcano; a fiasco is usually the result of human failure. Fiasco comes from the Italian term that means "to make a bottle." How it came to describe an utter, embarrassing, disaster in the English language is still unknown. Today, you'll hear fiasco used in situations that have gone so horribly awry that they are almost laughable, like the Thanksgiving dinner fiasco in which the turkey burnt to a crisp, the dog ate all the side dishes, and everyone had to eat frozen pizza instead.
Vocabulary lists containing fiasco
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This Week in Pop Culture: February 16 - 22, 2019
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
For some of those companies, the Strait of Hormuz fiasco has been a stock boost.
From MarketWatch ● Aug. 1, 2026
We were so excited to assign blame for the Platner fiasco in the first few entries that we forgot to offer anything forward-looking.
From Slate ● Jul. 11, 2026
Some auto job losses are probably an overhang from the electric-vehicle fiasco.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 9, 2026
Similarly, the Sunday Mirror leads with "Kicking off", and pairs a photograph of England footballer Harry Kane with the caption "World Cup fiasco".
From BBC ● Jul. 4, 2026
Hoagland had officially made him my wingman, to keep an eye on me, given my fiasco with Emile Luzan.
From "Native Speaker" by Chang-rae Lee
More often it’s how mistakes turn into fiascoes.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 3, 2026
The emergency was the latest in a years-long series of fiascoes within L.A.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 1, 2025
From failed gender reveal to photo-shoot flops, read on for nine of the funniest parenting fiascoes that made headlines this year.
From Fox News ● Dec. 29, 2019
The good news is the state report makes multiple recommendations that, if followed, should help Florida’s universities avoid future accounting fiascoes, while strengthening boards of trustees and the Board of Governors, which oversees universities.
From Washington Times ● Mar. 13, 2019
What happened next changed history and resulted in one of America's most tragic medical fiascoes.
From "Ambushed!" by Gail Jarrow
If the fiascos Jobs encountered were largely of his own making, the successes often had to do with luck.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 17, 2026
The financial fiascos weren’t enough to cancel the Crypties.
From New York Times ● Dec. 1, 2022
Hudson’s detractors point to the public-relations fiascos the group suffered under her watch, from #OscarsSoWhite to the “Moonlight”/“La La Land” envelope snafu to the Will Smith Slap.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 20, 2022
This most private public servant finds herself repeatedly ensnared in public fiascos, which makes for a dramatic life story that easily fills 500 pages — and Abedin is only 45.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 31, 2021
She had come, not because she had the slightest sympathetic interest in Musa—on the contrary, she was coldly angry with him—but because she had a horror of fiascos.
From The Lion's Share by Arnold Bennett
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
