hazard

Meanings

Noun

• The chance of suffering harm; danger, peril, risk of loss.
• An obstacle or other feature which causes risk or danger; originally in sports, and now applied more generally.
• An obstacle or other feature that presents a risk or danger that justifies the driver in taking action to avoid it.
• A sand or water obstacle on a golf course.
• The act of potting a ball, whether the object ball (winning hazard) or the player's ball (losing hazard).
• A game of chance played with dice, usually for monetary stakes; popular mainly from 14th c. to 19th c.
• Chance.
• Anything that is hazarded or risked, such as a stake in gambling.
• The side of the court into which the ball is served.
• A problem with the instruction pipeline in CPU microarchitectures when the next instruction cannot execute in the following clock cycle, potentially leading to incorrect results.

Verb

• To expose to chance; to take a risk.
• To risk (something); to venture, to incur, or bring on.

Related

Similar words

• adventure
• bet, pledge, skin in the game, wager

Narrower meaning words

• biohazard
• chemical hazard
• geohazard
• health hazard
• moral hazard
• occupational hazard

Origin

• From Middle English hasard, from Old French hasart ("a game of dice") (noun), hasarder (verb), probably from Arabic زهر ("the dice"). Compare Spanish azar, Portuguese azar.