/lʌk/
[noun] The force that seems to make good or bad things happen to a person by chance, without any clear reason or cause. People often say someone has good luck when nice things happen to them without them trying, and bad luck when things go wrong for no obvious reason.
The word 'luck' didn't exist in English until the 1400s — Shakespeare's ancestors had no single word for it.
The word 'luck' arrived in English surprisingly late — not until the fifteenth century — which is remarkable for such a fundamental human concept. Its most likely source is Middle Dutch 'luc', a shortened form of 'gheluc', meaning happiness or good fortune. Closely related is Middle Low German 'lucke', which carries the same sense. Both of these Germanic forms are thought to descend from a Proto-Germanic root reconstructed as '*galukam', though the exact prehistoric origin remains a matter of some debate among scholars. It is a word that appears to have no clear ancestor in Latin or Greek, making it something of a mystery in the family tree of European languages.
What is striking is that Old English — the language spoken in England before the Norman Conquest — had no direct equivalent of 'luck' at all. Anglo-Saxon speakers used words like 'wyrd' (fate or destiny, a grander, more cosmic idea) or 'hæl' (health, wholeness, which is also the ancestor of 'hale', 'heal', and even 'holy') to express related ideas. The arrival of 'luck' into English likely came through contact with Dutch and Low German merchants and traders during the prosperous North Sea trade of the late medieval period. The word slipped into English not through literature or the Church, but through the busy, practical world of commerce and gambling.