Failure

The word failure entered English in the 1640s from Anglo-French failer, meaning a non-occurrence or a ceasing to exist. The French form descended from Old French falir, which came from Latin fallere, meaning to deceive, to disappoint, or to be wanting.1

The original sense was impersonal. A crop could fail. A supply could fail. The word described something that did not happen, without attaching moral weight to the person involved.

The application of failure to a person, as a quality of character rather than an event, emerged later. By the mid-nineteenth century, a person could be a failure, not merely experience one. The word had shifted from describing an outcome to defining an identity.1

This shift coincided with the rise of industrial capitalism and the ideology of self-made success. In a system that promised anyone could succeed through effort, the inability to succeed became a personal verdict.

Japanese uses shippai (失敗), which combines the characters for "lose" and "defeat." German Scheitern originally described a ship breaking apart. In Silicon Valley, "fail fast" became a maxim in the early twenty-first century, attempting to strip the word of its shame and reframe it as a learning mechanism.2

The Latin root fallere also gave English the word false, the word fault, and the word fallacy. Each carries a different shade of the original meaning: deception, deficiency, and flawed reasoning. Failure absorbed them all.1