fast – English adjective declension

English adjective forms of fast

Adjective: fast

Comparison Forms

Synthetic

Comparativefaster
Superlativefastest

Perifrastic

Sample Sentences

  • That rope is dangerously loose. Make it fast!
  • out-lawes […] lurking in woods and fast places [1596 (date written; published 1633), Edmund Spenser, A Vewe of the Present State of Irelande […], Dublin: […] Societie of Stationers, […], →OCLC; republished as A View of the State of Ireland […] (Ancient Irish Histories), Dublin: […] Society of Stationers, […] Hibernia Press, […] [b]y John Morrison, 1809, →OCLC:]
  • I still hear you sayin', "Dear one, hold me fast" [1933, Will Hudson, Irving Mills, Eddy DeLange, Moonglow:]
  • I am going to buy a fast car.
  • Plutonium-240 has a much higher fission cross-section for fast neutrons than for thermal neutrons.
  • Sydney is a fast city, and the pace is becoming increasingly more frantic. [1968, Carl Ruhen, The Key Club, Sydney: Scripts, page 15:]
  • a fast racket, or tennis court
  • a fast track
  • a fast billiard table
  • a fast dance floor
  • But at the microlevel it consists of an unimaginable number of atoms connected by springy chemical bonds, all jiggling around at a rate that even our fastest supercomputer might envy. [2007 November 18, Jim Holt, “Mind of a Rock”, in The New York Times:]
  • Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon’t, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep. [c. 1606 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Macbeth”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene i]:]
  • All the washing has come out pink. That red tee-shirt was not fast.
  • Mineral pigments were probably the first materials used for dyeing. They were generally not fast to water. [1979, Kax Wilson, A History of Textiles, Westview Press, →ISBN, page 87:]
  • Cochineal is remarkably fast on protein fibers, remaining brilliant and saturated despite exposure to sunlight and washing. [2026, Sara Temme, “Two Insects nad Their Brilliant Reds”, in Handwoven, volume XLVII, number 1, page 19:]
  • Roses, damask and red, are fast flowers of their smells. [1625, Francis [Bacon], “Of Gardens”, in The Essayes […], 3rd edition, London: […] Iohn Haviland for Hanna Barret, →OCLC:]
  • a fast woman
  • […] we remember once hearing a fast man suggest that they were evidently "nobs who had overdrawn the badger by driving fast cattle, and going it high" — the exact signification of which words we did not understand […] [1852, John Swaby, Physiology of the Opera, page 74:]
  • Had Senator Wilson won the unenviable reputation of being a fast man—a lover of wine, or had he shown himself to the public in a state of inebriety, unable to stand erect in Fanueil Hall for instance, leaning upon the desk to “maintain the center of gravity,” and uttering words that fell sprawling in “muddy obscurity” from lips redolent of rum, rendering it necessary for a prompter and an interpreter to sculpture his speech into symmetry for the public ear and the public press, he would have been pelted from his high office with the indignant ballots of his constituents. [1867, George W. Bungay, “Temperance and its Champions”, in The Herald of Health and Journal of Physical Culture, volume I, page 277:]
  • “I don’t like that young woman,” said Lady Hermione; she’s fast.” “Dear Lady!” “I’ve no doubt you think me old-fashioned. Well, I’m glad I am. I say she’s fast, and what’s more, heartless. I was watching her before supper, and I’m sorry for Tony Lee. She’s been flirting as hard as she can go with Harry Vibart-not to give it a worse name-and she’s got Jim Playfair on a string too. She can’t even leave Frank Bellingham alone, though she’s staying in his house.” [1933, Dorothy L. Sayers, The Queen’s Square:]
  • You're alone with her at last / And you're waiting 'til you think the time is right / Cause you've heard she's pretty fast / And you're hoping that she'll give you some tonight. [1979, Doug Fieger, Good Girls Don't:]
  • […] if she is of the slightly faster kind that gives smart lunch parties at the Strand Corner House, her diet is sometimes a little stronger; she takes to novels of the orchid house and the tiger's lair, to the artless erotics of Miss Elinor Glyn, Mr Hubert Wales, and Miss Victoria Cross. [1918, Walter Lionel George, A Novelist on Novels:]
  • There must be something wrong with the hall clock. It is always fast.

Adjectives inflected like fast

sallow, smooth, slight, sleigh, sordid, somber, shweet, shrill, shrewd, yellow, yaller, hard knock, DRY, Greek, cut short, unquiet, unclean, indiscreet, chipper, straicht, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)

Etymology

1. Etymology tree
2. Proto-Germanic *fastuz
3. Proto-West Germanic *fast
4. Old English fæst
5. Middle English fast
6. English fast
7. From Middle English fast, fest, from Old English fæst (“firm, secure”), from Proto-West Germanic *fast, from Proto-Germanic *fastuz; see it for cognates and further etymology.
8. The development of “rapid” from an original sense of “secure” apparently happened first in the adverb and then transferred to the adjective; compare hard in expressions like “to run hard”. The original sense of “secure, firm” is now slightly archaic, but retained in the related fasten (“make secure”). Also compare close meaning change from Latin rapiō (“to snatch”) to Latin rapidus (“rapid, quick”), from Irish sciob (“to snatch”) to Irish sciobtha (“quick”).