hazard

Meaning

Noun

1. The chance of suffering harm; danger, peril, risk of loss.
2. An obstacle or other feature which causes risk or danger; originally in sports, and now applied more generally.
3. An obstacle or other feature that presents a risk or danger that justifies the driver in taking action to avoid it.
4. A sand or water obstacle on a golf course.
5. The act of potting a ball, whether the object ball (winning hazard) or the player's ball (losing hazard).
6. A game of chance played with dice, usually for monetary stakes; popular mainly from 14th c. to 19th c.
7. Chance.
8. (obsolete) Anything that is hazarded or risked, such as a stake in gambling.
9. The side of the court into which the ball is served.
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.

Verb

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

Pronounced as (IPA)

/ˈhæ.zɚd/

Etymology

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.