Read along with the three podcasts, or open the full dictionary entry for Precarious for the definition, Arabic meaning, synonyms and example sentences.
Narrator: Today's word is "Precarious" — adjective, pronounced /prɪˈkeəriəs/, with the stress on "car".
Narrator: Precarious means likely to fall, fail or change for the worse at any moment.
Narrator: In plain English, something precarious is shaky and unsafe.
Narrator: It comes from the Latin precarius, meaning obtained by begging, and so dependent on someone else's favour.
Narrator: A common collocation is "a precarious position", which describes a situation that could easily go wrong.
Narrator: It differs from "dangerous", because danger can be stable, while precarious always suggests delicate balance.
Narrator: In a second sense, precarious work means jobs with no security, such as zero-hours contracts.
Narrator: Economics, journalism, mountaineering and social policy all rely on the word.
Narrator: So remember: precarious means balanced on the edge of trouble.
Speaker A: Why did the reporter say the government's majority was precarious?
Speaker B: Because it could collapse any day! PRECARIOUS comes from the Latin precarius, dependent on the favour of others.
Speaker A: So it is fragile and uncertain?
Speaker B: Exactly, one wrong move and it falls.
Speaker A: Example sentences?
Speaker B: "The vase was balanced in a precarious position", a physical risk. "Many freelancers have precarious incomes", a financial worry. "The climbers made a precarious descent", a dangerous journey.
Speaker A: Common mistakes?
Speaker B: Spell it with "-arious", not "-orious", and do not use it simply to mean very dangerous.
Speaker A: Close relatives?
Speaker B: Unstable is its wobbly cousin, insecure is its financial twin, and shaky is the everyday alternative, but precarious keeps its cliff-edge charm!
Speaker B: Let's use "precarious" in AI prompts — useful for financial health apps and server monitoring.
Speaker A: How would a finance app use it?
Speaker B: Ask for gentle, clear warnings.
Prompt: Analyse this monthly budget and explain in two sentences whether the user's savings position looks stable or precarious.
Speaker A: And server monitoring?
Speaker B: Describe the risk thresholds.
Prompt: Write an alert rule that marks a server as precarious when disk space is under ten percent and memory use is above ninety percent.
Speaker A: Could it help writers?
Speaker B: Yes, for vivid description.
Prompt: Describe a hiker crossing a precarious rope bridge in one tense paragraph of under eighty words.
Speaker A: One more?
Speaker B: Research tools.
Prompt: Summarise this report on precarious employment into five key statistics suitable for a presentation slide.
Precarious — meaning in Arabic & definition More P courses GL Dictionary