Word of the Day

: March 8, 2015

fatidic

adjective fay-TID-ik

What It Means

: of or relating to prophecy

fatidic in Context

I hope the dream I had last night about losing my wedding ring doesn't prove fatidic.

"Shakespeare strews his plays with portents; Pushkin probes his life for fatidic dates; but no writer can have been more fascinated by patterns in time than Nabokov." - Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays, 2011

Did You Know?

As you might guess, fatidic is a relative of the word fate. The Latin word for fate is fatum, which literally means "what has been spoken." Fatum, in turn, comes from fari, meaning "to speak." In the eyes of the ancients, your fate was out of your hands-what happened was up to gods and demigods. Predicting your fate was a job for oracles and prophets. Fatidic is fatum combined with dicere, meaning "to say." That makes fatidic a relative of the word predict as well; the -dict of predict also comes from Latin dicere.