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say it: FAYT-fuhl
fateful is an adjective meaning "having momentous consequences; of decisive importance". It carries 4 recorded senses.
ominously prophetic
(of events) having extremely unfortunate or dire consequences; bringing ruin
“the stock market crashed on Black Friday”
“a calamitous defeat”
“the battle was a disastrous end to a disastrous campaign”
“such doctrines, if true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory”
“it is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it”
“a fateful error”
controlled or decreed by fate; predetermined
“a fatal series of events”
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 fateful 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.