jeopardy

<font size="-1" face="arial, helvetica"> <p> <strong> <font color="#000066">Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 28, 2021 is:</font> </strong> </p> <p> <strong>jeopardy</strong> &#149; \JEP-er-dee\&nbsp; &#149; <em>noun</em><br /> <p><strong>1 :</strong> exposure to or imminence of death, loss, or injury <strong>:</strong> <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/danger">danger</a></p> <p><strong>2</strong> <em>law</em> <strong>:</strong> the danger that an accused person is subjected to when on trial for a criminal offense</p> </p> <p> <strong>Examples:</strong><br /> <p>Rather than risk placing passengers in <em>jeopardy</em>, the pilot waited for the storm to pass before taking off.</p> <p>"… and cornerback Richard Sherman's in <em>jeopardy</em> of missing the last two games with calf stiffness that has bothered him since September." — <a href="https://www.sacbee.com/sports/nfl/san-francisco-49ers/article248041570.html">Chris Biderman, <em>The Sacramento (California) Bee</em>, 23 Dec. 2020</a></p> </p> <p> <strong>Did you know?</strong><br /> <p>Geoffrey Chaucer employed the word <em>jeopardy</em> in his late 14th-century masterpiece, <em>The Canterbury Tales</em>, 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 <em>jeopardy</em> were formerly myriad. <em>The Oxford English Dictionary</em> reports that between the late 14th and mid-17th centuries the word was spelled in a great variety of ways, among them <em>iuperti</em>, <em>yoberte</em>, <em>iepardye</em>, <em>ieoberye</em>, and <em>jobardy</em>.</p> <br /><br /> </p> </font>