Home › Glossary › Letter F

Fall from grace

Idiomatic Phrase
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

To lose one's good standing, reputation, or privileged position due to a mistake, sin, or revelation of wrongdoing.

Detailed Definition
Theologically rooted in the Fall of Adam and Eve, this idiom carries the weight of paradise lost, moral catastrophe, and irreversible change. In poetry, it describes the arc from innocence to knowledge, from favor to exile, from integrity to compromise. Poets from Milton to contemporary writers deploy it to explore pride, corruption, and the tragic necessity of mistakes in human development. Its religious resonance gives it gravity in secular contexts, suggesting that even in a post-theological age, the experience of catastrophic moral failure retains something of the sacred. The fall is both ending and beginning—the loss of a simpler self and the beginning of a more complicated, perhaps wiser, one.
Example
Example in poetry:
Milton's Satan, Lucifer, Adam and Eve — the Western literary tradition is organized in large part around the fall from grace, and a poem invoking the phrase carries the weight of all those precursor narratives; A confessional poem about public disgrace — the career-ending mistake, the revelation that undoes a reputation — might use fall from grace to locate personal catastrophe within this larger theological and literary frame; In a poem about the loss of religious faith, fall from grace is reframed: not the original sin of disobedience but the grace of honest doubt — the poem suggesting that falling from an inherited certainty might be the beginning rather than the end; A poem about a political figure's downfall might describe their fall from grace with the measured interest of someone watching an inevitable arc reach its conclusion — the height from which they fell proportional to the grandiosity of their self-presentation; In a love poem, fall from grace might describe the moment the idealized beloved reveals their ordinary humanity — the fall from the pedestal the speaker had constructed, and the poem's meditation on whether the real person is preferable to the icon; The phrase suits poems about the relationship between greatness and ruin, asking whether the capacity for the former is inseparable from the vulnerability to the latter
Additional Notes
This phrase has strong religious and social resonance. In poetry, a “fall from grace” may refer to sin, scandal, loss of innocence, political disgrace, or a private moral collapse. It evokes Eden, angels, height, descent, and the loss of favour. The phrase is powerful because it combines external reputation with inner spiritual damage.
Also Known As
Lose favor Be disgraced
Skip to main content