/ˈdeɪndʒər/
[noun] The possibility that something harmful, painful, or bad will happen. If you are in danger, you are in a situation where you could be hurt or something could go seriously wrong.
Danger originally meant the power of a lord over his subjects — not threat, but ownership and control.
The word 'danger' began not as a feeling of fear or a threat of harm, but as something far more political: the absolute power of a master over those beneath him. Its earliest ancestor is the Latin word 'dominium', meaning lordship or ownership, which came from 'dominus', the Latin word for master or lord. From 'dominus', Vulgar Latin produced the word 'dominiarium', meaning the jurisdiction or authority of a lord — the reach of his power over people and land alike.
This Latin root passed into Old French as 'dangier', which carried the sense of a lord's power to control, punish, or withhold favour from his subjects. If you were 'en dangier' in medieval France, you were not necessarily facing a sword or a fire — you were under someone's authority, subject to their will, dependent on their mercy. The word described a relationship of power, not a physical threat.
Old French 'dangier' crossed the English Channel in the 13th century, arriving in Middle English as 'daunger' or 'danger'. In its early English life, the word kept its feudal flavour. A creditor might hold a debtor 'in danger', meaning in their power or at their mercy. The great medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer used 'daunger' in this older sense in 'The Canterbury Tales', where a figure called Daunger appears in 'The Romaunt of the Rose' as a personification of a lady's aloofness and power to refuse her admirer — the power to say no.
Over the 14th and 15th centuries, the meaning of 'danger' began to shift. If being in someone's power meant you could be harmed or punished, then the word gradually absorbed the idea of harm itself. The sense moved from 'under someone's control' to 'exposed to risk of harm', and eventually the political meaning of lordly power was almost entirely lost. By the 16th century, 'danger' had settled into the meaning we recognise today: a situation or thing that could cause injury, loss, or ruin.
What makes this journey so remarkable is how completely the word shed its social and feudal meaning. Today, almost nobody would guess that 'danger' once described the authority of a feudal lord rather than a burning building or a stormy sea. The root word 'dominus' also gave English other words through different paths — Latin 'dominus' → Old French 'dame' and 'don' → English 'dame', and Latin 'dominari' → Old French 'dominer' → English 'dominate' — showing how the same ancient root could branch out in wildly different directions depending on which qualities of the original concept each language chose to carry forward.