/ˈfɔːrtʃən/
[noun] Luck, chance, or the force that seems to control what happens in a person's life; also used to mean a large amount of money or wealth.
Fortune was once a Roman goddess who spun a giant wheel — and your whole life depended on where it stopped.
The story of 'fortune' begins with the ancient Romans and their goddess Fortuna, whose name came from the Latin word 'fors', meaning chance or luck. Fortuna was one of Rome's most popular deities — a capricious, blindfolded figure who turned an enormous wheel, lifting some people to great heights and casting others into ruin without reason or mercy. The very randomness of her nature made her terrifying and fascinating in equal measure. From her name came the Latin noun 'fortuna', meaning luck, fate, or the things that happen to you by chance.
The Romans used 'fortuna' in a rich and layered way. It could mean good luck, bad luck, or simply the general circumstances of one's life — wealth, status, and all the things that seemed to arrive unbidden. A soldier's fortuna was his luck in battle. A merchant's fortuna was the prosperity of his business. The word carried within it both the thrill of possibility and the terror of unpredictability, and this tension never quite left the word as it moved forward through time.
When the Roman Empire declined and Latin evolved into the medieval languages of Europe, 'fortuna' passed into Old French as 'fortune', carrying the same broad meanings of luck and fate. The French used it freely in literature and philosophy, and it was through Old French that the word crossed into Middle English during the 13th and 14th centuries. English writers and thinkers adopted it eagerly — partly because they had no single native word that captured the same idea with such force and colour.
In English, 'fortune' quickly became central to the way people talked about life's ups and downs. Medieval writers like Geoffrey Chaucer used it constantly, and the image of Fortune's Wheel — the old Roman idea — remained very much alive. The wheel appears in Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' and was a favourite image in the visual art of the Middle Ages, reminding people that even the most powerful king could be thrown down by chance. This moral and philosophical dimension gave the word a weight that went far beyond simple luck.
Over the following centuries, 'fortune' began to develop a second, more concrete meaning: a large sum of money or valuable possessions. This shift makes a kind of sense — after all, wealth was the most visible sign of fortune's favour. By the 17th and 18th centuries, you could 'make your fortune' or 'inherit a fortune', and the word had firmly settled into this financial sense alongside its older meaning of luck or fate. The original goddess had, in a way, been replaced by the bank balance.
Today 'fortune' lives a double life in English, meaning both wealth and luck depending on context. We tell fortunes, meaning we predict the future. We say something 'cost a fortune', meaning it was very expensive. We wish people 'good fortune' as a blessing. Phrases like 'fortune favours the brave' still echo the ancient Roman idea that the goddess rewarded boldness. The word has travelled more than two thousand years from a spinning wheel in a Roman temple to everyday conversation, and it has lost almost none of its original energy along the way.