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say it: fayl
fail is a verb meaning "fail to do something; leave something undone". It is pronounced /ˈfeɪl/ — fayl. It carries 11 recorded senses.
fail to do something; leave something undone
“She failed to notice that her child was no longer in his crib”
“The secretary failed to call the customer and the company lost the account”
be unsuccessful
“Where do today's public schools fail?”
“The attempt to rescue the hostages failed miserably”
disappoint, prove undependable to; abandon, forsake
“His sense of smell failed him this time”
“His strength finally failed him”
“His children failed him in the crisis”
stop operating or functioning
“The engine finally went”
“The car died on the road”
“The bus we travelled in broke down on the way to town”
“The coffee maker broke”
“The engine failed on the way to town”
“her eyesight went after the accident”
fall short in what is expected
“She failed in her obligations as a good daughter-in-law”
“We must not fail his obligation to the victims of the Holocaust”
become bankrupt or insolvent; fail financially and close
“The toy company went bankrupt after the competition hired cheap Mexican labor”
“A number of banks failed that year”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for fail come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.