What does "one fell swoop" mean?

"Shakespeare either coined the phrase, or gave it circulation, in Macbeth. Shakespeare used the imagery of a hunting bird's 'fell swoop' to indicate the ruthless and deadly attack by Macbeth's agents. In the intervening years we have rather lost the original meaning and use it now to convey suddenness rather than savagery."

So it basically means... doing something all at once, quickly.

One Fell Swoop Meaning

The phrase is one of those fixed expressions that we hardly think about most of the time. It means all at once, suddenly. It’s been around in the language for at least 400 years. Shakespeare is first recorded as using it, in Macbeth: when Macduff hears that his family has been murdered, he says in disbelief:

All my pretty ones?

Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?

What, all my pretty chickens and their dam

At one fell swoop? The image that Shakespeare’s audience would have brought to mind at once was a falcon plummeting out of the sky to snatch its prey (like the kite for example, which was a bird of prey long before it became an aerial machine). You might guess that fell has something to do with fall, but it hasn’t. It actually means some thing of terrible evil or deadly ferocity. We now never see it outside this fixed phrase (or perhaps only occasionally in poetic use) but once it was a common word in its own right. One of its relatives is still about: felon, which comes from the same Old French source, fel, evil. Originally a felon was a cruel or wicked person; only later did the word evolve to mean a person who commits a serious crime.

There are actually four fell words in English; apart from this one, there is the verb meaning to cut down (intimately linked with fall), the one meaning an animal skin (as in the obsolete trade of fellmonger), and the one meaning a hill (as in the fells of Cumbria). They all come from different source words.

it mean with one action. It was derived from lumberjacking. Chopping down a tree was also referred to as felling a tree. One fell swoop would be the last swing of the axe that would bring the tree down. it is the final action or single action that would make the tree fall, because all the swoops of the axe before it didn't make it fall so it was referred to as one fell swoop. Hope that helps and I can't believe some of the crap that I actually remember lol.

It's "one foul swoop". And I believe it just means "all at once".

i always thought it meant "all at once", "all of a sudden", although it has somewhat of a negative connotation because the word "fell" means cruel or savage.

www.dictionary.com, type in "in one fell swoop"

Nothing.

It was made up in the 7th Century to dissuade witches from practising Tomology.

looks like jibberish to me,that is in a cars song though,something about a miss placed fix,sounds kind of southern becuase it speaks of needs

It means that something happened quickly or swiftly without any hitches.

In one quick movement at the same time. (i was brought up around all of those old fuddy duddy sayings and i looove them!)