dangier

Danger comes from the Old French dangier (power, authority, dominion), from the Vulgar Latin *dominiārium, from the Latin dominium (lordship, ownership), from dominus (lord, master). The word entered English in the thirteenth century meaning 'the power of a lord to harm, jurisdiction, control.' To be 'in danger' was to be within someone's power — subject to their authority and their ability to punish. The word was about sovereignty, not safety.

The shift from 'power over someone' to 'risk of harm' happened in English between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The intermediate stage was 'difficulty, resistance' — a thing was dangerous if it was hard to deal with. A dangerous river was one that resisted navigation. A dangerous opponent was one difficult to defeat. The sense of physical peril emerged last, by analogy: if you are in someone's power, they might hurt you.

The Lord's Prayer in early English translations used 'danger' in its original sense. 'Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil' was sometimes rendered with the concept of being delivered from danger — meaning from the devil's dominion, not from physical harm. The theological and the feudal meanings overlapped perfectly.

By the sixteenth century, the original meaning was extinct. Shakespeare uses danger exclusively in the modern sense — risk of harm. The feudal lord's power became the falling rock's threat. The word's entire moral framework shifted: danger was something you did to people (exercised power) and became something that happened to people (posed risk). The lord became the cliff.