ipso facto

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin ipsō factō (“by the same fact”).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˌɪpsəʊ ˈfæktəʊ/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

Adverb

ipso facto (not comparable)

1. By that very fact itself; actually.

   Coordinate term: eo ipso

   • 1919, Henry B[lake] Fuller, “Cope at His House Party”, in Bertram Cope’s Year: A Novel, Chicago, Ill.: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, The Alderbrink Press, →OCLC, page 94:

     Cope was not long in feeling him as operating on the unconscious assumption—unconscious, and therefore all the more damnable—that the young man in business constituted, ipso facto, a kind of norm by which other young men in other fields of endeavor were to be gauged: […]

   • 1999 April, Bryan Caplan, “The Austrian Search for Realistic Foundations”, in Southern Economic Journal, volume 65, number 4, page 833:

     For [Ludwig von] Mises or [Murray] Rothbard, it is simply confused to posit latent preferences; if two individuals fail to make an exchange, then this ipso facto demonstrates that at that moment at least one of them would not have benefited from the exchange.

   • 2023 October 10, HarryBlank, “The Cruelest Fight”, in SCP Foundation‎^[1], archived from the original on 31 August 2024:

     Intellectually, Ibanez had understood that there would be a lot of caverns. She'd once read that the Great Lakes, the largest freshwater bodies in the world, had a surface area of something like a quarter of a million square kilometres. The Mishepeshu were said to have used their tunnels to travel between the lakes and their islands. Ipso facto, there would be a lot of interior space down here. She'd patrolled some of it before. She'd seen it mapped by drones like the ones Nascimbeni had used. She should have been prepared.

Related terms

• per se

Translations

By that fact

• Bulgarian: са́мо по се́бе си (sámo po sébe si)
• Czech: samo o sobě
• Finnish: itsessään
• French: ipso facto (fr)
• German: ipso facto (de)
• Italian: ipso facto
• Latin: ipso facto
• Spanish: ipso facto (es)
• Swedish: ipso facto, genom sakens natur
• Ukrainian: по фа́кту (po fáktu), наспра́вді (nasprávdi)

Adjective

ipso facto (not comparable)

1. Being such by itself, or by its own definition; inherent.
   • 1984 April 14, Richard Knisely, “Quintessential Narcissism”, in Gay Community News, page 13:

     Is not the reading of another's diary an ipso facto act of voyeurism?

Further reading

• The Oxford English Dictionary (2007)
• “ipso facto”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.

French

Adverb

ipso facto

1. ipso facto

References

• “ipso facto”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

Italian

Alternative forms

• issofatto (vernacular)

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from Latin ipsō factō.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /i.pso ˈfak.to/, /ˈi.pso ˈfak.to/
• Rhymes: -akto
• Hyphenation: i‧pso‧fàc‧to, ì‧pso‧fàc‧to

Adverb

ipso facto

1. immediately

   Synonyms: immediatamente, issofatto, subito

   lo cacciò ipso facto da casa sua ― he immediately kicked him out of his house

2. (chiefly law) by that very fact itself; automatically, ipso facto

   Synonym: automaticamente

Further reading

• ipso facto in Treccani.it – Vocabolario Treccani on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana

Spanish

Adverb

ipso facto

1. ipso facto

Further reading

• “ipso facto”, in Diccionario de la lengua española, Vigésima tercera edición, Real Academia Española, 2014