fitness
- 1The practice of building and keeping a healthy or attractive body through exercise.
His fitness improved dramatically after months of regular training.
Many people take up running as part of a broader fitness routine.
Similarconditioning, health, condition, shape, exercise
Note
Sports reporting gives this sense a stock phrase of its own. Phil McNulty, writing for BBC Sport in 2011, described Carroll as "edging slowly towards full fitness." In that use, fitness is a condition a player can lose and win back, not only a pastime. The noun also works before other nouns, as in a fitness routine, where it names the whole business of training rather than any one person's state.
- 2The condition of being suitable, appropriate, or good enough for a particular purpose.
The court examined the candidate's fitness for public office.
Engineers tested the bridge's fitness to carry heavy loads.
Similarsuitability, eligibility, competence, aptitude, capacity
Oppositeunfitness
Note
The oldest of the word's meanings. It was built from fit plus -ness and has been in use since the 16th century, long before the exercise sense arrived in 1935. It once reached as far as the moral order of things: E. J. Guerin's Mountain Charley (1861) speaks of "an eternal fitness in all things." Today it usually measures someone or something against a task, with for or to: fitness for office, fitness to carry loads. Its opposite is unfitness.
- 3The degree to which an organism or species succeeds in finding a mate and producing offspring.
Biologists compared the reproductive fitness of the two beetle populations.
Camouflage increases an organism's fitness in environments full of predators.
Similarsuitability, capability
Note
A biologist's word that has little to do with strength or health. What counts is offspring, not muscle. A frail creature that leaves many descendants is fitter, in this sense, than a powerful one that leaves none. Because it is a measure, it is usually compared rather than simply possessed, as in higher or lower reproductive fitness. It keeps the older idea of suitability: an organism well fitted to its surroundings.
- 4The quality of being physically attractive, good-looking, or desirable.
He turned heads all night, and everyone at the bar was remarking on his fitness.
She fancied the lifeguard purely on the strength of his fitness.
Similarhotness, attractiveness, looks, sexiness
Oppositeugliness
Note
Here the word is British slang, built from fit in its sense of "good-looking." It belongs to casual talk among friends and sounds out of place in writing or formal settings. It shares its spelling with the exercise sense, so context does the work. Remarking on someone's fitness at a bar is about looks, not stamina, and it carries no suggestion of health or athletic condition.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from "fit" combined with the suffix "-ness." It was first attested in the 16th century, with the physical sense appearing in 1935.