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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

hazard.

A game of chance played with dice, usually for monetary stakes, popular mainly from 14th c. to 19th c.

6 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈhæzəd/Received-Pronunciation/ˈhæzɚd/Canada, General-American/ˈhæzəd/Australia/ˈhɛzəd/New-Zealand
  1. A game of chance played with dice, usually for monetary stakes, popular mainly from 14th c. to 19th c.

    countable · historical · uncountable
  2. Chance; accident, unpredictability.

    countable · uncountable
  3. The risk of some loss or harm; danger, peril, the chance of an adverse outcome.

    uncountable
    He encountered the enemy at the hazard of his reputation and life.
  4. A situation involving such a risk of harm or loss; (later also) a person or object which poses such a risk, something seen as a source of danger or difficulty.

    countable
    The video game involves guiding a character on a skateboard past all kinds of hazards.
  5. Each of the various openings or galleries around the side of a court.

    countable · uncountable
  6. Anything that is hazarded or risked, such as a stake in gambling.

    countable · obsolete · uncountable
  7. A stroke which results in potting a ball, whether the object ball (winning hazard) or the player's ball (losing hazard).

    countable · uncountable
  8. Something which prevents free striking of the ball, such as a sand or water obstacle.

    countable · uncountable
  9. A cabstand, especially in Dublin.

    Ireland · countable · historical · uncountable
  10. 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.

    countable · uncountable
Where this word comes from

From Middle English hasard, from Old French hasart (“a game of dice”) (noun), hasarder (verb), from Arabic اَلزَّهْر (az-zahr, “the dice”). Compare Spanish azar, Portuguese azar.

verb/ˈhæzəd/Received-Pronunciation/ˈhæzɚd/Canada, General-American/ˈhæzəd/Australia/ˈhɛzəd/New-Zealand
  1. To expose to chance; to take a risk.

  2. To risk (something); to venture, incur, or bring on.

    I'll hazard a guess.
Where this word comes from

From Middle English hasard, from Old French hasart (“a game of dice”) (noun), hasarder (verb), from Arabic اَلزَّهْر (az-zahr, “the dice”). Compare Spanish azar, Portuguese azar.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.