Fateful means having important and usually bad consequences. A fateful decision, that fateful day, a fateful meeting.
It is used looking backwards: nothing is fateful until you know what followed, which is why it belongs to narrative rather than to planning. That fateful day is the fixed phrase. Note the difference from fatal, which means causing death, and from fateless, which does not exist; and that fateful and fatal both come from fatum, meaning what has been spoken.
1adjectivefatefulHaving important and usually bad consequences.
“On that fateful morning, he decided to take the earlier train.”
fateful is a quality of consequence.
Fate plus -ful, from Latin fatum, a thing spoken — from fari, to speak. Fate was literally what the gods had pronounced, and fame and infant come from the same speaking.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰeh₂-
Latin
fāta — prediction
Middle English
fate
English
fate
English, today
fateful
Built from
From fate + ful. fate comes from Middle English fate, from Latin fāta (“prediction”), plural of fātum, from fātus (“spoken”), from for (“to speak”). In this sense, displaced native wyrd, whence Modern English weird.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA