fizzle

1. To make a hissing or sputtering sound.

2. Informal To fail or end weakly, especially after a hopeful beginning.

Word History: Philemon Holland, in his 1601 translation of Pliny's Natural History, wrote that if asses eat a certain plant, "they will fall a fizling and farting." Holland's asses provide a vivid example of the original meaning of the word fizzle, which was, in the decorous phrasing of the Oxford English Dictionary, "to break wind without noise." During the 19th century fizzle took on a related but more respectable sense, "to hiss, as does a piece of fireworks," illustrated by a quotation from the November 7, 1881, issue of the London Daily News: "unambitious rockets which fizzle doggedly downwards." In the same century fizzle also took on figurative senses, one of which seems to have been popular at Yale. The Yale Literary Magazine for 1849 helpfully defines the word as follows: "Fizzle, to rise with modest reluctance, to hesitate often, to decline finally; generally, to misunderstand the question." The figurative sense of fizzle that has caught on is the one most familiar today, "to fail or die out."

1. n.
   a failure; something that sputters away. : The whole project was a fizzle.
2. in.
   to fail; to peter out. : The whole plan fizzled, and we had to start over.
3. F
   a wild card word for words beginning with , such as fuck, fool. (Streets. Also for other words with initial F.) : That dude is such a fizzle!