核心畫面
You can picture fatal as the blow that ends things for good: after it lands, whatever it hit does not get back up. First and most literally that means a body stops living — a crash, a disease, a dose of something. The same picture then covers a plan, an argument or a hope: fatal marks the one hit there is no recovering from.
可以想成一種「打下去就再也起不來」的畫面。最直接的一層是生命：車禍、疾病、誤食的東西，落下去之後人或動物就沒了。這個…更多收起
可以想成一種「打下去就再也起不來」的畫面。最直接的一層是生命：車禍、疾病、誤食的東西，落下去之後人或動物就沒了。這個畫面之後被整個搬去看計畫、爭論、希望——fatal 標記的不是「傷得重」，而是「傷完就沒有回頭路」，所以說某件事 fatal，等於說它把事情終結掉了。原始詞典資料6 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
fataladj/ˈfeɪ.təl/
- 1
archaicrareProceeding from, or appointed by, fate or destiny.
- She mixed furniture with the same fatal profligacy as she mixed drinks, and this outrageous contact between things which were intended by Nature to be kept poles apart gave her an inexpressible thrill.
- 2
archaicrareForeboding death or great disaster.
- Such a scandal as the prosecution of a brother for forgery—with a verdict of guilty—is a most truly horrible, deplorable, fatal thing. It takes the respectability out of a family perhaps at a critical moment, when the family is just assuming the robes of respectability: […] it is a black spot which all the soaps ever advertised could never wash off.
- 3
Causing death or destruction.
- a fatal wound; a fatal disease; that fatal day; a fatal mistake
- Author Rita Mae Brown consistently strings together short comical movie clips which may be fine for screenplays but fatal in novels. Unfortunately, Toder chooses to imitate this model and her story suffers.
- 4
computingengineeringmathematicsCausing a sudden end to the running of a program.
- a fatal error; a fatal exception
fatalnoun/ˈfeɪ.təl/
- 1
A fatality; an event that leads to death.
- another fatal on the turnpike during rush hour
- For this same period there have been four fatals and 44 nonfatals in gassy mines.
- 2
computingengineeringmathematicsA fatal error; a failure that causes a program to terminate.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。