fate [LME] This comes from Latin fatum ‘what has been said’, from fari ‘to speak’, source also of *fabulous. The main sense of fatum was ‘the judgement or sentence of the gods’, but it came to mean a person’s ‘lot’, or what would happen to them. The Fates were the three goddesses of Greek and Roman mythology who presided over the birth and life of humans. Each person was thought of as a spindle, around which the three Fates (Clotho, the spinner, Lachesis, who measured the thread, and Atropos, who cut it off) would spin the thread of human destiny.