A.Word.A.Day --fettle

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Dec 15, 2025

This week’s theme
Fossil words

This week’s words
fettle

Juno Borrowing the Belt of Venus, 1781
Fettle comes from Old English fetel, a belt or girdle. Juno borrows Venus’s magic belt to be in fine fettle for Jupiter.

Art: Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

Previous week’s theme
Illustrated words

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

If you know the English language the way you know a loved one’s quirks, you already know this: kibosh is always put on things (never taken off), living is eked out (never in), and people run (never stroll) amok.

Human language works like humans. Logic makes occasional guest appearances, but habit runs the household. We keep doing things not because they make sense, but because that’s how they’ve always been done. Language tags along, nodding, not asking questions.

Some words in English now live almost exclusively inside set phrases. Take fro in “to and fro” (it’s short for from). Outside that pairing, fro has long gone.

These are known as fossil words. They’re mostly obsolete, except where they’ve been preserved in idioms, like insects in amber or trilobites in limestone.

This week we’ll brush the dust off five of them.

fettle

PRONUNCIATION:

(FET-l)

MEANING:

noun: State or condition.

ETYMOLOGY:

From English dialect fettle (to make ready), probably from Old English fetel (girdle, belt). Earliest documented use: 1748.

NOTES:

You’ll encounter this word almost exclusively cohabiting with fine, as in fine fettle. To be in fine fettle is to be ready for action, much like a knight girding his belt (the word’s ancestor).

While the noun is a fossil in general English, the verb fettle is busy doing ceramics (trimming the rough edges) and metallurgy (lining a furnace hearth), and sometimes getting nouned in these senses.

USAGE:

“The economy was in fine fettle, apart from Germany, then as now the ‘sick man of Europe’.”
Peak Europe Turns 25; The Economist (London, UK); Jun 8, 2024.

See more usage examples of fettle in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Writing is like carrying a fetus. -Edna O'Brien, writer (15 Dec 1930-2024)

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