/tʃæns/
[noun] The occurrence of events without any clear cause or plan; luck or fortune. It can also mean an opportunity to do something, or the possibility that something will happen.
The word 'chance' literally comes from a Latin word meaning 'to fall' — as in the fall of dice.
The story of 'chance' begins in ancient Rome, with the Latin verb *cadere*, meaning 'to fall'. This was not a metaphorical falling — it referred quite literally to the physical tumble of dice on a gaming table. From *cadere* came the Latin noun *cadentia*, meaning 'a falling' or 'the way things fall', and it is here that we can already feel the word tilting toward its modern sense: fate decided by something dropping, something landing where it will.
As Latin evolved into Old French over the early medieval centuries, *cadentia* contracted and transformed into *cheance* (sometimes spelled *chëance* or *cheaunce*), carrying the same core meaning of 'a falling' but now extended to mean the fall of fortune itself — good luck, bad luck, or simply whatever happens to land. This Old French word was rich with the atmosphere of medieval gambling, markets, and uncertain lives, where so much truly did depend on how things fell.
English absorbed *cheance* from Old French in the 13th century, during the long period after the Norman Conquest when French was the language of the English court and aristocracy. The word arrived already carrying multiple meanings: accident, luck, fortune, and opportunity. By the 14th century, writers like Geoffrey Chaucer were using 'chance' freely, treating it as a fully English word to describe both the randomness of fate and the openings that fate sometimes offered.
Over the following centuries, 'chance' quietly split into several distinct but related ideas that we still use today. On one hand, it kept its original sense of randomness and unpredictability — 'it happened by chance', meaning no one planned it. On the other hand, it developed the warmer sense of opportunity — 'give me a chance', meaning a moment when something good might be possible. This dual personality, fate-as-threat and fate-as-gift, makes 'chance' one of the most emotionally flexible words in English.
The same Latin root *cadere* — 'to fall' — quietly shaped dozens of other English words through different routes. Latin *cadere* became *accidere* ('to fall upon, to happen'), which passed through Old French *accident* into English as 'accident'. It also gave us 'incident' (from Latin *incidere*, 'to fall into'), 'coincidence' (things falling together at the same time), and the musical term 'cadence' (the falling rhythm of a phrase), which came through Italian *cadenza* and French *cadence*. Even the word 'decay' traces back here, through Old French *decair* from Latin *decadere*, meaning 'to fall away'. All of these words carry, buried inside them, that original image of something tumbling down.