fatality

Fatality refers to the state of being dead or the event of death resulting from injury or disease. It can describe a person who has died or a count of deaths in a given context. The term is commonly used in medical, legal, and statistical settings as well as in everyday language.

The word derives from Latin fatalitas, meaning fate or ruin, and historically connotes a doomed outcome. In modern usage, fatality emphasizes the outcome of death rather than the underlying processes alone.

In medicine and forensic science, fatality involves determining that death has occurred and identifying its cause and manner. Criteria for death may include the absence of circulation and breathing, and often the absence of brain activity. Autopsy or other investigations can be used to establish the cause of death (such as disease, injury, or poisoning) and the manner of death (natural, accidental, suicidal, homicidal, or undetermined). Death certification and related legal or administrative actions commonly rely on such determinations.

In epidemiology and statistics, fatality is used in phrases such as case fatality rate, which measures the proportion of deaths among identified cases of a particular condition or event. Mortality, by contrast, generally describes the death rate in a broader population over a given time.

Cultural usage includes the term’s appearance in entertainment, where Fatality is the name of a finishing move in certain video games, notably Mortal Kombat, signaling a decisive and lethal action. See also death, mortality, cause of death, and autopsy.