Hazard was a dice game before it was a danger. Old French had hasard by the twelfth century, meaning the game itself and, in some accounts, one particular throw. From there the word drifted from the chances at the table to the chances in life, and English took it in the late 1300s. Now it is printed in black on yellow beside wet floors, and nobody hears the dice.

Where hasard came from is not settled. The usual guess is Arabic az-zahr, “the die”, picked up somewhere in the Crusader Levant; the doubters point out that zahr is missing from the classical dictionaries, and offer a different Arabic verb for playing at dice. So the word for chance has an origin nobody can call with confidence, which seems about right.

What I like is that it was named for the game, not for the losing. A hazard was once something you chose to sit down at. The sign on the wet floor is the same word from the other side: a throw you never agreed to make.