Precarious

How to spell precarious

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce precarious

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does precarious mean?

1. adjectiveDangerously insecure, unstable, or likely to fail at any moment.

Precarious in a sentence

• The ladder was balanced in a precarious position against the wall.

• After losing his job, the family's finances became dangerously precarious.

Where does precarious come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin precarius, which literally meant 'obtained by asking or praying', and so 'held only through the goodwill of someone else'. It was built on prex (stem prec-), the Latin noun for a prayer or entreaty, the same root that gives us 'pray', 'imprecation' and 'deprecate'. In Roman law a precarium was a thing granted as a favour and revocable at any moment, so the word carried the idea of holding something only at another person's pleasure. English borrowed it in the early 1600s, at first in that legal sense of an uncertain tenure, and the meaning soon broadened to anything dangerously insecure or liable to collapse. Remembering that the heart of the word is prec-, the root for 'prayer', helps fix the single c and the -ari- in the middle.

How the word is built

• prec- (from Latin prex/prec-: prayer, entreaty)
• -ari- (relating to)
• -ous (full of, adjective suffix)