fiasco [M19th] A fiasco is a ridiculous or humiliating failure. The word was borrowed from Italian in the 19th century. In that language it meant originally ‘a bottle’, but the phrase far fiasco, literally ‘make a bottle’, was used in the theatre to mean ‘fail in a performance’. In medieval English a flask [ME] was a cask or skin for holding liquor. The word came from medieval Latin flasca (along with LME flagon) but the 17th-century sense ‘glass container’ was influenced by Italian fiasco.