say it: fayl-SAF
fail-safe is an adjective and noun meaning "guaranteed not to fail". It carries 3 recorded senses.
eliminating danger by compensating automatically for a failure or malfunction
“a fail-safe device in a nuclear weapon to deactivate it automatically in the event of accident”
a mechanism capable of returning to a safe state in case there is a failure or malfunction
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for fail-safe 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.