chancy
/ˈtʃɑːnsi
/adjective (chancier, chanciest) informal
Involving risks and uncertainty: football coaching is a chancy business...
- But intelligence-gathering has always been a chancy business.
- Economists recognize that estimating multiplier effects is a chancy business under the best of circumstances.
- Predicting tomorrow's weather is chancy business, let alone a five-day forecast.
Synonyms
risky, unpredictable, uncertain, speculative, precarious;
problematical, unsettled, unsafe, insecure, exposed, touch-and-go, tricky, treacherous, dangerous, fraught with danger, high-risk, hazardous, perilous
informal dicey, sticky, hairy
British informal dodgy
North American informal gnarly
archaic or humorous parlous
Derivatives
chancily
- In fact, a well-finished closet can be one of the high points when you show off your house - especially to a friend who still tosses things in and then chancily crams the door shut.
- Last time I remember him playing chancily is his game with black against Morozevich in Corus this year.
- This makes it not irrelevant to ask how the dramatist's career might have looked if he too had succumbed, just as chancily, to typhoid or plague in early January four centuries ago.
chanciness
- As Garry Wills states, ‘the chanciness of arousal shows the loss of the integrity, the unison, of body and soul’.
- He likes the chanciness of the San Andreas fault, on which he now lives in California.
- The chanciness of anyone's coming-to-be is part of the human condition, like mortality.