You know, obviously, what “danger” means. But I’ll bet you don’t know what it used to mean!
As you might expect, “danger” is a pretty old word. It entered English in the 1200s, or possibly earlier, and came from Latin. The Latin word it comes from is “dominus,” which means master or lord. The original way “danger” was used was to say that one was “in Lord Farquar’s danger,” which meant under his authority.
As someone named W. Lonmor pointed out in 1556, “danger” also came to mean debt: “I am gretly yn your danger and dette for my pension.” Usage was still the same; you’d be “in someone’s danger” if you were under their authority or owed them money. This sense of “danger” persisted until the early 1800s, when it seems to have been largely forgotten. In the 1700s, though, the phrase “Out of Debt out of Danger” seems to have been well known.
Another meaning of “danger”, although closely related to the first, was subjugation. You could be in a “state of danger” if you were something like an indentured servant or slave. “Till..thou lowse him out of bondage, that is in thy daunger” is how it was put in the “Coverdale Bible” of 1535.
Back in the day you might also have come across something like this: “ A Gent. threatned to bring him into danger.” What that meant, in the 1600s, was not about threatening physical harm. Instead, it meant liability — what we’d say today would be “a gentleman threatened to take him to court.” We’d say that if we could actually find a gentleman, at least.
“Danger” had another sense, for a while, expressed as “make a danger.” If you “made a danger” you were reluctant or hesitant to proceed. John Foxe used it that way in a 1526 book with one of those titles as long as a paragraph (so I’m not going to mention it): “I made daunger of it a while at first, but afterward beyng persuaded by them..I promised to do as they would haue me.”
Chaucer used “danger” in yet another way; it meant being rude. “Hir daunger made him booþe bowe and beende And as hir lyste made him tourne and wende.” This sense of “danger” only lasted a century or so, though; it’s historically one of the less common ways to use the word. Another rare usage was that in 1600s England you’d pay rent to use part of a forest (to gather firewood, for example), and that rent was called “danger.” This sense is derived from the original “authority” sense of “danger,” because the authority of the rent-collector (who had authority over the forest itself) was also called “danger.”
What we meant today by “danger” — the possibility of damage or harm — didn’t arise until the late 1400s. William Caxton was one of the first to use “danger” this way, in his 1490 translation of “Foure Sonnes of Aymon”: “There is dangeour by cause of the nyghte.” And that, as you already know, is the meaning of “danger” that outlasted all the others. And just wait; “danger” isn’t the only English word to come from “dominus.” There are the obvious ones (domain, dominion), as well as a couple having to do with hereditary authority (don, dame), and a couple of unexpected ones (dungeon and dome). Interesting that out of all those, only “dungeon” sounds at all dangerous.
