“Hazard” started as a game of dice

Before it meant danger, a hazard was a roll of the dice. The word may have wandered in from Arabic gaming tables.

A hazard today is a danger, a risk, something to avoid. But for centuries it meant something you'd do for fun on a Friday night: hazard was a game of dice.

The etymology of “hazard”

English picked the word up around 1300 from Old French hasard, the name of a popular dice game. From the game came the natural next steps: a hazard became any roll of the dice, then any chance you took, and by the 1500s, the chance of loss or harm. The danger meaning we use now is actually the youngest one.

Trace it back further and it gets murky. The old favorite theory says hasard came from an Arabic word for the dice themselves, carried into Europe during the Crusades. It's a lovely story, but scholars aren't sold, since the supposed Arabic word is hard to pin down in the old dictionaries. The dice-game origin is solid; the trail before that goes cold.

Still, the shape of the word makes sense. Every risk is a kind of gamble, and hazard just remembers the table it was rolled on.