# hazard

> English word · Noun · IPA /ˈhæzəd/ · frequency rank #7,348

## Definitions
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. 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.

## 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.

## Easily confused with
- **heard** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/hazard-vs-heard)
- **hoard** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/hazard-vs-hoard)
- **Howard** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/hazard-vs-howard)
- **hard** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/hard-vs-hazard)
- **Hamad** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/hamad-vs-hazard)
- **Hagar** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/hagar-vs-hazard)
- **Harare** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/harare-vs-hazard)
- **Harvard** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/harvard-vs-hazard)
- **hayward** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/hayward-vs-hazard)
- **haggard** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/haggard-vs-hazard)
- **Hansard** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/hansard-vs-hazard)

## Common misspellings (9)
`ahzard`, `haazrd`, `hazadr`, `hazardd`, `hazarrd`, `hazrad`, `hazzard`, `hhazard`, `hzaard`

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/hazard