Other forms: faded, fading, fades
To fade is to lose strength little by little until there is nothing left. The red poster in the shop window goes pink over one summer; the last chord of a song gets quieter and quieter and then the room is silent.
Colour, light, sound, hope, memory, a smile, a bruise — all of them fade, and the word carries the same slowness every time. Things fade by themselves: your jeans fade in the wash, the noise fades away down the street. Where somebody does it on purpose it is a sound engineer or a film editor, and they fade a track in or out. Two phrases are worth having whole. Fade away is what weak signals and old soldiers do, and fade into the background is what you do at a party you did not want to come to.
1verbcolourTo lose colour or brightness.~12%
“The curtains have faded to a pale grey.”
2verbviewTo grow gradually fainter until it is gone.~34%
“The applause faded as the lights came up.”
synonyms: die away, dwindle
3verbfadeTo lose strength or importance.~40%
“Their hopes of promotion faded in April.”
4verbpictureTo make a picture or a sound grow gradually weaker.~14%
“The editor faded the music under the dialogue.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 86 sentences found in the wild and placed 50 of them on a sense (36 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old French fade meant weak and witless. It passed through Middle Dutch vade — weak, faint, limp — and reached Middle English as vade: faded, pale, withered, weak. Where the French word itself came from is obscure; the likeliest account puts Latin fatuus, insipid, behind it, and in that case the colour going out of a curtain and the flavour going out of a soup were once the same complaint.
Latin
fatuus — insipid
Vulgar Latin
*fatidus
Old French
fade — weak, witless
Middle Dutch
vade — weak, faint, limp
Middle English
fade
English, today
fade
Built from
From Middle English fade, vad, vade (“faded, pale, withered, weak”), from Middle Dutch vade (“weak, faint, limp”), from Old French fade (“weak, witless”), of obscure origin. Probably from Vulgar Latin fatidus, from Latin fatuus (“insipid”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA