Other forms: faints, fainted, fainting, fainter, faintest
Faint means barely there. A faint smell of smoke somewhere down the street, a faint pencil line under the paint, a knock so faint you look up and wait to hear whether it comes again.
It reaches past sounds and smells to hopes and chances: a faint hope, a faint chance of a place, and the flat English refusal I haven't the faintest idea. Faint is a verb as well, and a far more dramatic one — to faint is to lose consciousness and go down, from heat or blood or standing too long in a queue. Feel faint and you are on the edge of that, dizzy and looking for a chair. The adverb faintly does quiet work in front of adjectives: faintly amused, faintly ridiculous. Watch the spelling, because feint sounds identical and means the fake move a boxer makes with the left before hitting with the right.
1adjectivesmellOnly just possible to see, hear or smell.~70%
“A faint smell of petrol hung in the garage.”
2verbfaintTo lose consciousness for a short time and fall.~6%
“She fainted in the heat and came round on the grass.”
3adjectivedizzyDizzy and close to losing consciousness.~18%
“I felt faint and sat down on the step.”
4adjectivesmallSo small it hardly counts — of a hope, a chance or an idea.~6%
“There is still a faint chance of a place.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 67 sentences found in the wild and placed 54 of them on a sense (13 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Faint and feign are the same word wearing different clothes. Old French faint meant feigned — and also sluggish, working half-heartedly — from Latin fingo, to shape or mould or make up. Fiction came down the same line, and dough is a distant relation. A faint sound is a half-made one.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰeyǵʰ- — to mold
Latin
fingo — to touch, handle, form, shape, frame, form in thought, imagine, conceive, contrive, devise, feign
Old French
faint
Middle English
faynt
English, today
faint
Built from
From Middle English faynt, feynt (“weak; feeble”), from Old French faint, feint (“feigned; negligent; sluggish”), past participle of feindre, faindre (“to feign; sham; work negligently”), from Latin fingo (“to touch, handle, form, shape, frame, form in thought, imagine, conceive, contrive, devise, feign”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European dʰeyǵʰ- (“to mold”). Cognate with feign and fiction and more distantly dough.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA