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fell

UK/fɛl/US/fɛl/
adjectiveC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — fellow sits at #660neutral

Fell means fierce and cruel, in old use. A fell purpose, at one fell swoop, fell deeds.

It survives almost entirely in one fell swoop, which is Macbeth's, and where fell means savage rather than sudden. It is a different word from the verb to fell a tree and from a fell in the north country.

Definitions of fell

  1. 1adjectivefellFierce and cruel, in old use.C2

    “The knight rode out to face the fell beast that had burned the village.”

fell is a quality.

Where it comes from

From Old French fel, cruel or treacherous, the same root as felon.

  1. Proto-Germanic

    *fallijaną — to fell, to cause to fall

  2. Proto-West Germanic

    *fallijan

  3. Old English

    fellan

  4. Middle English

    fellen

  5. English, today

    fell

Built from

  • fiellan · Old English — to cause to fall, strike down, fell, cut down, throw down, defeat, destroy, kill, tumble, cause to stumble

From Middle English fellen, from Old English fellan, fiellan (“to cause to fall, strike down, fell, cut down, throw down, defeat, destroy, kill, tumble, cause to stumble”), from Proto-West Germanic fallijan, from Proto-Germanic fallijaną (“to fell, to cause to fall”), causative of Proto-Germanic fallaną (“to fall”), from Proto-Indo-European h₃elh₁-. Cognate with Dutch vellen (“to fell, cut down”), German fällen (“to fell”), Danish fælde (“to fell”), Norwegian felle (“to fell”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

fell in the wild

  • The topography of Lapland varies from vast mires and forests in the south to fells in the north.

    Lapland (Finland)

  • Wainwrights are the 214 English peaks (known locally as fells) described in Alfred Wainwright's seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells.

    List of Wainwrights

  • The word snape means "pasture"; thus Fair Snape Fell may mean "fell of the fair (beautiful) pasture".

    Fair Snape Fell

  • Considerable areas of the Bowland fells were used for military training during World War II and there are still unexploded bombs in some areas, including nearby Wolf Fell.

    Fair Snape Fell

  • The name arises from the origins of the English sport on the fells of northern Britain, especially those in the Lake District.

    Fell running

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • fellow
  • fellowship