Other forms: fiascos
A fiasco is a complete and embarrassing failure. A total fiasco, the whole fiasco, turned into a fiasco.
The embarrassment is essential: a quiet failure is not a fiasco, and a public collapse in front of people who expected better is. It suits events, launches and ceremonies. The word is Italian for a bottle, and the theatrical phrase far fiasco — to make a bottle — meant to flop on stage. Why a bottle meant a flop has never been satisfactorily explained, which is oddly fitting.
1nounfiascoA complete and embarrassing failure.
“The launch was a fiasco: the website crashed within minutes.”
synonyms: debacle, shambles
fiasco is a public failure.
Also accepted in games: disaster, debacle
Italian fiasco means a bottle, from the same Germanic root as flask. The theatrical slang far fiasco, to make a bottle, meant to fail on stage, and nobody has ever explained the image.
French
faire fiasco
Proto-Germanic
*flaskǭ — bottle
Frankish
*flaskā — bottle, flask
Latin
flasca
Italian
fiasco — bottle, flask
English, today
fiasco
Built from
Borrowed from Italian fiasco (“bottle, flask”), from Latin flasca, flascō (“bottle, container”), from Frankish flaskā (“bottle, flask”) from Proto-Germanic flaskǭ (“bottle”); see flask. “Failure” sense comes through French faire fiasco from Italian theatrical slang far fiasco literally “to make a bottle”, of uncertain origin; perhaps from an expression fare il fiasco, meaning to play a game with the forfeit that the loser will buy the next bottle or round of drinks. a doublet of flacon and flagon and flask.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA