precarious

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /pɹəˈkɛəɹi.əs/
• (US) IPA^(key): /pɹəˈkɛɹi.əs/
• Rhymes: -ɛəɹiəs

From Latin precārius (“begged for, obtained by entreaty”), from prex, precis (“prayer”). Compare French précaire, Portuguese precário, and Spanish and Italian precario.

precarious (comparative more precarious, superlative most precarious)

1. (comparable) Dangerously insecure or unstable; perilous.
   • 1898, Winston Churchill, chapter 4, in The Celebrity:

     One morning I had been driven to the precarious refuge afforded by the steps of the inn, after rejecting offers from the Celebrity to join him in a variety of amusements. But even here I was not free from interruption, for he was seated on a horse-block below me, playing with a fox terrier.

2. (law) Depending on the intention of another.

Because the pre- element of precarious derives from prex and not the preposition prae, this term cannot — etymologically speaking — be written as *præcarious.

• 1906, Jack London, White Fang, part I, ch III,

  Never had he been so fond of this body of his as now when his tenure of it was so precarious.

• (not held or fixed securely and likely to fall over): unsteady, rickety, shaky, tottering, unsafe, unstable, wobbly

• precarious in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• precarious in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.

pre- + carious

precarious (not comparable)

1. (dentistry) Relating to incipient caries.