# fate

Pronunciation: say "FAYT" /feɪt/

## Noun

1. What happens or will happen to a person or thing, or the outcome of a situation, seen as decided in advance and often unwelcome, such as death or ruin.
   - Simple: What finally happens to someone or something, often something bad, as if it was decided beforehand.
   - _The prisoners awaited their fate with quiet dread._
   - _She walked toward her fate without once looking back._
2. A supposed force, principle, or divine will believed to determine everything that happens.
   - Simple: A power that some people believe controls everything that happens, before it happens.
   - _Ancient writers often spoke of fate as a power no mortal could resist._
   - _He blamed fate rather than his own reckless choices._
4. The mature endpoint that a cell, group of cells, or region of an embryo eventually develops into, together with all the changes leading there.
   - Simple: What a cell in a growing embryo finally turns into, plus all the changes along the way.
   - _Researchers traced the fate of cells in the developing limb bud._
   - _Signals from neighboring tissue help determine the fate of each embryonic cell._
5. What ultimately happens to a chemical substance once it is released into the environment, including how it moves, how it breaks down or changes, and where it ends up.
   - Simple: What happens to a chemical after it gets into nature, such as where it goes and how it changes.
   - _Researchers examined the environmental fate of the pesticide after it entered the soil._
   - _The fate of nitrogen compounds in the watershed concerned the ecologists._

## Verb

3. To set the course of events in advance so that an outcome cannot be avoided.
   - Simple: To decide something ahead of time so that it has to happen.
   - _From the moment the storm hit, our camping trip seemed fated to end early, and we were home by noon._
   - _In the novel, the hero is fated to lose everything he loves, no matter how hard he fights._

## Origin

Latin "for" ("to speak") gave "fatus" ("spoken") and the noun "fatum," whose plural "fata" meant "prediction." Middle English took this as "fate." In this sense it pushed aside native Old English "wyrd," the source of Modern English "weird."

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/fate (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).