Wednesday, December 23, 2009

David’s Definitions for February 2010

Hapless

Unfortunate, luckless, unlucky. It comes from an old word, hap, which originally meant luck or chance and then later came to mean good luck. We don't use hapless in modern English, but we do use other words that come from the same root. For example, happen was originally happenen and it meant "occur by hap." If you're happy, you possess hap, good fortune. Haphazard, meaning irregular or disordered, comes from combining hap with hazard, which was a game played with dice.

(Will be published in the February 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

I'm collecting all of these at:
http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quite

TGirsch said...

I dunno. I don't think "hapless" is all that obscure, or even obsolete. Though I do more often see it misused to mean something more like "inept."

Anonymous said...

It is certainly interesting for me to read the article. Thanks for it. I like such themes and everything that is connected to this matter. I definitely want to read a bit more on that blog soon.

Anonymous said...

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!