What does fiche mean?
Fiche refers to a small card, slip, or — most familiarly — a sheet of microfilm on which information has been photographically reduced. In its dominant modern form, 'microfiche', it names a flat sheet holding hundreds of miniature document pages that can be magnified and read on a dedicated machine. Throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century, fiche was the backbone of libraries, archives, and government offices: newspapers, censuses, patent filings, and catalogs were all preserved this way because the sheets were compact, durable, and cheap compared with paper. Though digital scanning has made the technology largely obsolete, millions of documents survive only in fiche form, keeping both the medium and the word alive among archivists and researchers. The word comes from French, where it originally meant a peg or small slip used for filing, and English adopted it in the context of information storage. Today it carries a faintly nostalgic, archival connotation — a reminder of an era when finding a fact meant cranking a microfilm reader rather than typing into a search box.
nounA small card, slip of paper, or sheet of microfilm on which information is recorded; used chiefly in the term 'microfiche', a flat sheet of film carrying miniaturized pages that must be read with a magnifying device.
- A card or slip on which data is recorded, especially a microfiche: a sheet of microfilm containing pages of text in reduced form.
"The librarian retrieved the census records from a drawer of microfiche."
"She threaded the roll through her hands until she found the fiche holding the 1962 property records."
"The archive's newspaper collection was transferred to fiche decades before digitization."
The standard English plural is 'fiches', though some users treat 'fiche' as an invariant collective form.
"The basement cabinets held thousands of fiches documenting parish registers."
Before Google, entire libraries lived on sheets of film you could hold in one hand — and we still call each one by a French word meaning 'a little peg'.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of fiche
English borrowed 'fiche' directly from French, where the word meant a peg, pin, or small slip used for attaching or indexing papers. The French noun derives from the verb 'ficher' ('to fix, to fasten'), which descends ultimately from Latin 'figere', meaning 'to fasten' or 'to pierce'. This same Latin root gave English 'fix', 'affix', and 'transfix', making those words true relatives of fiche. The specialized sense of a data-bearing sheet arose in twentieth-century French and English with the invention of microphotography, giving us 'microfiche'.
How fiche is actually used
The word rarely appears alone today; it survives almost entirely within 'microfiche' and the phrase 'on fiche'. The plural is usually 'fiches', though 'fiche' itself is sometimes treated as unchanged.
Easily confused with fiche
'Fish' is an animal living in water, while 'fiche' is a card or sheet used to store recorded information; they share a similar sound but nothing else.