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fate

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //feɪt//

The presumed cause, force, principle, or divine will that predetermines events.

noun

  1. 1

    The presumed cause, force, principle, or divine will that predetermines events.

    Captain Edward Carlisle[…]felt a curious sensation of helplessness seize upon him as he met her steady gaze,[…]; he could not tell what this prisoner might do. He cursed the fate which had assigned such a duty, cursed especially that fate which forced a gallant soldier to meet so superb a woman as this under handicap so hard.

  2. 2

    The effect, consequence, outcome, or inevitable events predetermined by this cause.

  3. 3

    An event or a situation which is inevitable in the fullness of time.

  4. 4

    Destiny; often with a connotation of death, ruin, misfortune, etc.

    Accept your fate.

  5. 5

    The products of a chemical reaction in their final form in the biosphere.

    It’s important to research chemical fate because chemical fate is the best tool we have for understanding and managing human health risks or environmental damage caused by chemical release.

  6. 6

    The mature endpoint of a region, group of cells or individual cell in an embryo, including all changes leading to that mature endpoint

  7. 7

    Variant of FateAlternative letter-case form of Fate (one of the goddesses said to control the destiny of human beings).

Etymology

From Middle English fate, from Latin fāta (“prediction”), plural of fātum, from fātus (“spoken”), from for (“to speak”). In this sense, displaced native Old English wyrd, whence Modern English weird.

verb

  1. 1

    To foreordain or predetermine, to make inevitable.

    The oracle's prediction fated Oedipus to kill his father; not all his striving could change what would occur.

    Before they met, Rebecca Guberman and Jennifer Jako were both certain they were fated to be alone.

    At the conclusion of this part, Eric, who plays Jesus and is now a soldier, captures Violet in the forest, fating her to a concentration camp.

Forms

plural
fates
past tense
fated
past participle
fated
present participle
fating
third person singular
fates
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).