fatal
Americanadjective
-
causing or capable of causing death; mortal; deadly.
a fatal accident;
a fatal dose of poison.
- Antonyms:
- life-giving
-
causing destruction, misfortune, ruin, or failure.
The withdrawal of funds was fatal to the project.
- Synonyms:
- devastating, catastrophic, calamitous, disastrous, ruinous
-
decisively important; fateful.
The fatal day finally arrived.
-
proceeding from or decreed by fate; inevitable.
a fatal series of events.
-
influencing or concerned with fate; fatalistic.
-
Obsolete. condemned by fate; doomed.
-
Obsolete. prophetic.
adjective
-
resulting in or capable of causing death
a fatal accident
-
bringing ruin; disastrous
-
decisively important; fateful
-
decreed by fate; destined; inevitable
Usage
What does fatal mean? Fatal literally means deadly—capable of causing death.Similar words are deadly, lethal, and mortal—though they are often used in different ways.Fatal can also be used in a figurative way to mean capable of causing the destruction, ruin, or failure of someone or something, as in Failing to update their products proved to be a fatal mistake for the company. Example: These changes will hopefully greatly reduce the number of fatal car accidents that occur on highways.
Related Words
Fatal, deadly, lethal, mortal apply to something that has caused or is capable of causing death. Fatal may refer to either the future or the past; in either case, it emphasizes inevitability and the inescapable—the disastrous, whether death or dire misfortune: The accident was fatal. Such a mistake would be fatal. Deadly looks to the future, and suggests that which is likely to cause death (though not inevitably so): a deadly poison, disease. Like deadly, lethal looks to the future but, like many other words of Latin origin, suggests a more technical usage: a lethal dose; a gas that is lethal. Mortal looks to the past and refers to death that has actually occurred: He received a mortal wound. The disease proved to be mortal.
Other Word Forms
- fatalness noun
- nonfatal adjective
- nonfatally adverb
- nonfatalness noun
- quasi-fatal adjective
- quasi-fatally adverb
Etymology
Origin of fatal
First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English or directly from Old French, from Latin fātālis “ordained by fate, decreed”; fate, -al 1
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.
Perhaps the disappearance of history’s icons from a depreciating currency isn’t a fatal blow to the canon of British culture.
The five Georgia teens whose teacher died during a fatal practical joke will not be prosecuted in the educator's death, the district attorney has said.
From BBC
The mother of a girl injured after a fatal school shooting last month in Canada launched a lawsuit against OpenAI for its decision not to inform police of the suspect’s interactions with its ChatGPT chatbot.
Some honchos called it a “dangerous precedent” that would be potentially fatal to the studio system.
From Los Angeles Times
The fatal thought occurred to me that if the novel had started right here, in the thick of the tension, very little of what came before would have been missed.
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.
