Word.ws English Dictionary

fight the good fight

fight the good fight verb: to battle or try to achieve something for a noble cause.

Verb

fight the good fight (third-person singular simple present fights the good fight, present participle fighting the good fight, simple past and past participle fought the good fight)

  1. To battle or try to achieve something for a noble cause.
    • "My brethren," he said, "since God has not given our people victory in the combat, it must be because he requires of us, his spiritual soldiers, to fight the good fight of martyrdom, [...]"1820 March, [Walter Scott], chapter XII, in The Monastery. A Romance. […], volume III, Edinburgh: […] Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and for Archibald Constable and Co., and John...
    • [W]ho had imagined that her instruments of healing were a thermometer and a prayer-book; and who found herself fighting the good fight with a bandage machine?1912, Mary Roberts Rinehart, “God's Fool”, in Love Stories

Forms of fight the good fight

third-person singular presentfights the good fight
present participlefighting the good fight
past participlefought the good fight
pastfought the good fight

Origin of fight the good fight

A translation of the Koine Greek phrase ἀγωνίζου τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα τῆς πίστεως (agōnízou tòn kalòn agôna tês písteōs, “fight the good fight of faith”) in 1 Timothy 6:12 that appeared first in the Tyndale Bible, then in the King James Version.

Questions about fight the good fight

What does fight the good fight mean?
Fight the good fight means to battle or try to achieve something for a noble cause.
What part of speech is fight the good fight?
Fight the good fight is a verb.
What is the past tense of fight the good fight?
The past tense of fight the good fight is fought the good fight.

Words near fight the good fight in the dictionary

  1. fight shy
  2. fight song
  3. fight songs
  4. fight stick
  5. fight sticks
  6. fight the good fight
  7. fight the tape
  8. fight the tiger
  9. fight to the death
  10. fight to the finish
  11. fight up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fight the good fight (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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