Word of the Day

: January 28, 2021

jeopardy

noun JEP-er-dee

What It Means

1 : exposure to or imminence of death, loss, or injury : danger

2 law : the danger that an accused person is subjected to when on trial for a criminal offense

jeopardy in Context

Rather than risk placing passengers in jeopardy, the pilot waited for the storm to pass before taking off.

"… and cornerback Richard Sherman's in jeopardy of missing the last two games with calf stiffness that has bothered him since September." — Chris Biderman, The Sacramento (California) Bee, 23 Dec. 2020

Did You Know?

Geoffrey Chaucer employed the word jeopardy in his late 14th-century masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, but its Middle English form can make it hard to spot: it appears in the phrase "in jupartie" with a meaning very much akin to the word's meaning in the modern phrase "in jeopardy"—that is, "in danger." The spellings of what we now render only as jeopardy were formerly myriad. The Oxford English Dictionary reports that between the late 14th and mid-17th centuries the word was spelled in a great variety of ways, among them iuperti, yoberte, iepardye, ieoberye, and jobardy.