Other forms: facts
A fact is a piece of information that is true and can be checked. The boiling point of water, the year the war ended, the number of people in the room.
The word earns its keep in contrast: fact against opinion, fact against fiction, the facts of the case. In fact and as a matter of fact are the phrases you will use most, and both introduce something that corrects or sharpens what came before — he said he was fine; in fact he had not slept. The fact that lets you turn a whole clause into a noun: the fact that nobody complained surprised everyone. Law keeps the oldest flavour in accessory after the fact, where fact means the deed itself. And the facts of life is the conversation parents dread.
1nounfactA piece of information known to be true.~88%
“Check the facts before you print them.”
2nounrealityReality, as opposed to invention or belief.~6%
“The film blurs fact and fiction until you cannot tell which is which.”
3nounlawIn law, a thing that was done; a deed.~6%
“He was charged as an accessory after the fact.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
fact is a piece of information.
A fact was once a deed. Latin factum meant an act or a thing done, the neuter of factus, from faciō, to do or make, and it runs back to Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁-, to put, place, set. English took it in through Old French, and the sense drifted from the thing done to the thing that is true. Feat is the same Latin word arriving by a different road, which is why a feat is still something performed.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰeh₁- — to put, place, set
Latin
factum — an act, deed, feat, etc.
Old French
fact
English, today
fact
Built from
From Old French fact, from Latin factum (“an act, deed, feat, etc.”); also Medieval Latin for “state, condition, circumstance”; neuter of factus (“done or made”), perfect passive participle of faciō (“do, make”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European dʰeh₁- (“to put, place, set”). Old/Middle French later evolved it into faict and fait. a doublet of feat.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA