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Business vocabularyphrasal verb · /fæn aʊt/

fan out

In simple English

To distribute work, resources, or information across multiple team members or systems, often to enable parallel processing or wider coverage.

Someone heard a colleague say "fan out" in a meeting and wants to know what it means in a work context.

At a glanceCEFR B1–B2
Commonness
Versatility
FormalityCasualFormalNeutral
Spoken ↔ WrittenSpokenWrittenBoth
Directness ↔ DiplomaticDirectDiplomaticNeutral
Region

Say it like this

✓Let's fan out these tasks across the team.
✓We need to fan out the testing to finish on time.
✓The requests fan out to multiple services.
✓I'll fan out the updates to all stakeholders.
✓Can we fan out and tackle these bugs in parallel?

Real examples

Standup

"We have a lot to cover today, so let's fan out and each take a component to review."

Slack message

"Hey team, I'm going to fan out the testing tasks—check Jira for your assignments."

GitHub PR

"This change fans out API requests to multiple endpoints simultaneously."

Jira ticket

"Fan out the migration scripts to run on all database shards in parallel."

Retrospective

"We fanned out the workload well this sprint, which helped us finish early."

Sprint planning

"Let's fan out these user stories so everyone has something to work on."

Pair programming

"Should we fan out and work separately on these two functions?"

Don't say this

✕I will fan out the email to the team.
✓I will send the email to the team.— Fan out implies spreading work or tasks, not just sending a single message. Use 'send' for simple communication.
✕Let's fan out this one task.
✓Let's assign this task to someone.— Fan out suggests dividing among many. For one task, use 'assign' or 'delegate'.
✕We fanned out the meeting.
✓We spread the meeting invites to more people.— You fan out tasks or information, not events. Say what you actually spread.

Other forms

base form

fan out

"We need to fan out the work."

third person

fans out

"The system fans out requests to workers."

past tense

fanned out

"We fanned out the tasks yesterday."

present participle

fanning out

"We're fanning out the testing right now."

noun form

fan-out

"The fan-out pattern helps with load distribution."

Often used with

fan out tasksThe most common usage—dividing work among people
fan out requestsTechnical usage—sending requests to multiple services
fan out across the teamSpreading work to all team members
fan out in parallelEmphasizes simultaneous execution
fan out patternA software architecture term for distributing messages

Similar words

distributeMore formal, works in documents and meetings
spreadSimpler, everyday alternative
divide upEmphasizes splitting into parts
parallelizeTechnical term, specifically about running things at the same time
dispatchMore formal, often used for sending messages or workers

Opposites

consolidatecentralizegathercollectfan in

Practice

Try it

4 quick exercises

Choose the most natural sentence

1. Which sentence sounds most natural?

Find the mistake

2. Which sentence has an error?

Complete the sentence

3. We need to ___ ___ the workload so we can finish by Friday.

Rewrite in simpler terms

4. Rewrite this sentence: 'The architecture fans out incoming messages to multiple consumers.'

More words

parallelizedelegatescale outdistributeload balancequeueasync

Questions

Quick poll

Have you said "fan out" in a standup this week?

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