F. D. RooseveltEdith HamiltonJohn Locke
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The hap in haphazard comes from an English word that means "happening," as well as "chance or fortune." Hap, in turn, comes from the Old Norse word happ, meaning "good luck." Perhaps it's no accident that hazard also has its own connotations of chance and luck: while it now refers commonly to something that presents danger, at one time it referred to a dice game similar to craps. (The name ultimately comes from the Arabic word al-zahr, meaning "the die.") Haphazard first entered English as a noun meaning "chance" in the 16th century, and soon afterward was being used as an adjective to describe things with no apparent logic or order.
Synonyms
Examples of haphazard in a Sentence
Larry English, Forbes, 29 Feb. 2024
The last graves would not be removed until 1947, but most had already been carried off to two of the city’s haphazard pantheons: Evergreen, in Boyle Heights, founded in 1877, and Rosedale-Angelus, opened in 1884 in the then-faraway neighborhood of West Adams.
—Patt Morrison, Los Angeles Times, 27 Feb. 2024
American culture, after all, tends to treat sleep less as a matter of morality than as an outlet for haphazard moralism.
—Megan Garber, The Atlantic, 12 Oct. 2023
Here is the elephant so far: Thirteen billion years ago, in a universe that was then less than a billion years old, the Milky Way was born as a shapeless cloud of gas and dust, forming metal-poor stars and rotating incoherently so that its stars' orbits were also haphazard.
—Ann Finkbeiner, Scientific American, 16 Jan. 2024
So long as these new and excessive levels of digital communication persist, more haphazard upheavals will inevitably follow.
—Cal Newport, The New Yorker, 27 Dec. 2023
Dee Dee Friedrich remembers how haphazard wildfire horse rescues used to be in Orange County before a team formed to cart animals to safety.
—Gabriel San Román, Los Angeles Times, 21 Dec. 2023
The blender of haphazard luxury moments is incredible fashion fodder.
—Liana Satenstein, Vogue, 21 Dec. 2023
Even then, haphazard approaches can breed mistrust and waste the chance to learn lessons on prevention.
—Anna Clark, ProPublica, 31 Oct. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'haphazard.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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Cite this Entry
“Haphazard.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/haphazard. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.
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