William of Tyre

hazard

We can trace the word hazard all the way back to the 14th century, although not with the meaning it has today i.e. something which you can fall into/over/under and so on. Allow me to take you back to medieval Arabia, where games of chance involving dice were all the rage. The Arabic word for dice was ‘al-zhar’ or ‘az-zhar’, and as these dice games spread across Europe, they became known as al-zhar games. As generally happens with words though, ‘al-zhar’ got a bit messed up on its travels, and by the time it got to Spain it had morphed into ‘azar’And although it was still being used to describe the game, people also used it when they were talking about the random results of the dice throws.

When ‘azar’ made its way to France, it changed to ‘hasard’, and the Frenchies used it to describe unlucky dice throws. Over time people started using it to talk about anything that was a bit unlucky or risky. And when it made the leap over the Channel to British shores, ‘hasard’ became ‘hazard’. For a while it was just a noun, but at some point in the 16th century it got verbed, as people started hazarding things (maybe only guesses? I’m not sure what else you can ‘hazard’… Okay, I just looked it up and the definition of ‘hazard’ as a verb means to ‘offer or present as a risk’ so maybe you can hazard other things…? But people might think you’re a bit weird).

Let’s finish with a be-mulletted (although, SPOILER ALERT, not by the end) Richard Marx singing ‘Hazard’. This always used to make me sad as a child, and having googled it I realise it comes under the genre of ‘murder ballad’, which probably explains that.