/fɔːrˈtuːnə/
[noun] The Roman goddess of luck and fate, representing the unpredictable force that brings good or bad fortune to people's lives. The word is also used more generally to mean chance, luck, or destiny.
Fortuna was depicted with a blindfold and a spinning wheel — the original 'Wheel of Fortune' that shaped all of Western civilisation's idea of luck.
At the heart of the Latin word *fortuna* lies the root *fors*, meaning 'chance' or 'luck', itself connected to the Proto-Indo-European root *bher-*, meaning 'to carry' or 'to bring'. The idea was vivid and physical: fortune was something brought to you — carried to your door by invisible hands, either as a gift or a curse. From the very beginning, the concept carried this double edge: fortuna could smile upon you or destroy you, and it owed you nothing.
In ancient Rome, Fortuna was worshipped as a major goddess, one of the most widely venerated in the entire Roman world. She was depicted holding a cornucopia overflowing with gifts in one hand and a ship's rudder in the other, steering the course of human lives. Crucially, she was also shown standing on a sphere or spinning wheel — an image that communicated the terrifying instability of luck. What goes up must come down. The emperor seated at the top of the wheel today would be crushed beneath it tomorrow. This 'Wheel of Fortuna' became one of the most powerful images in all of Western culture.
The goddess's name passed into widespread use as a common noun in Latin, where *fortuna* simply meant 'luck', 'chance', or 'fate'. Roman writers like Cicero, Virgil, and Seneca used it constantly, and it carried enormous philosophical weight. For the Stoics, fortuna represented everything outside your control — wealth, health, reputation, life itself — and the wise person was one who did not depend on her gifts. This tension between fate and free will, between what we control and what we cannot, was encoded into the very word.
From Latin, *fortuna* flowed into Old French as *fortune*, and it arrived in Middle English in the 14th century, still carrying its full divine and philosophical weight. Chaucer used it repeatedly in *Troilus and Criseyde* and *The Canterbury Tales*, treating Fortune almost as a character herself — a capricious, wheel-spinning goddess who delights in reversals. The English word 'fortune' settled firmly into the language, and from it grew a whole family of descendants: *fortunate* (lucky), *unfortunate* (unlucky), *fortunately*, and the phrase 'fortune favours the bold', a direct translation of the Latin *fortes fortuna adiuvat*, used by the Roman playwright Terence as early as 161 BCE.
Over the centuries, 'fortune' shifted in English from meaning primarily 'luck' or 'fate' to also meaning 'a large amount of money' — a semantic journey that tells us something revealing about human values. If fortune is what fate brings you, and the greatest thing fate can bring is wealth, then 'fortune' and 'wealth' gradually became almost synonymous. By the 17th century, to 'make one's fortune' meant to become rich, and 'a small fortune' described an eye-watering sum. The goddess had become a banker.
The original Latin *fortuna* is still used today in English — particularly in music, literature, and philosophy — to evoke its full ancient resonance. Carl Orff's famous 1937 cantata *Carmina Burana* opens with the thunderous chorus 'O Fortuna', borrowing words from a 13th-century medieval poem that described the goddess in all her terrifying power. Whenever we spin a wheel on a game show, check our horoscope, or say 'fortune favours the brave', we are reaching back two and a half thousand years to a Roman goddess standing on her spinning wheel, deciding who rises and who falls.