Word.ws English Dictionary

fort-da

fort-da noun: the (repeated) disappearance and reappearance of an object, especially as a source of pleasure in child play.

Noun

fort-da

  1. The (repeated) disappearance and reappearance of an object, especially as a source of pleasure in child play.
    • The death loop represents a limit of the game system as well as the pleasures associated with fort-da present in the playing of digital games.2015, Emily Flynn-Jones, “Don't Forget to Die”, in Torill Elvira Mortensen, Jonas Linderoth, Ashley ML Brown, editors, The Dark Side of Game Play: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments...

Forms of fort-da

alternative formfort/da

Origin of fort-da

Borrowed from German fort (“gone”) and da (“there”), exclamations that Sigmund Freud heard his grandson utter while playing, described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

Questions about fort-da

What does fort-da mean?
Fort-da means the (repeated) disappearance and reappearance of an object, especially as a source of pleasure in child play.
What part of speech is fort-da?
Fort-da is a noun.

Words near fort-da in the dictionary

  1. Fort Worthians
  2. Fort Wright
  3. Fort Yates
  4. Fort Yukon
  5. Fort Zeelandia
  6. fort-da
  7. Fort-de-France
  8. Fort-Lamy
  9. fortake
  10. fortakest
  11. fortaketh

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fort-da (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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Cite this entry: “fort-da.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fort-da. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.