adventure
Pluraladventures
Pluraladventures
Formsadventures, adventuring, adventured
- 1A daring feat or bold undertaking in which danger is likely and the outcome depends on unforeseen events.
Crossing the Atlantic in a small boat was the kind of adventure few would dare attempt.
The expedition turned into a dangerous adventure when the storm cut off their retreat.
Similarventure, exploit, feat, undertaking, escapade
- 2A feeling of wanting new and exciting experiences.
Travel feeds her appetite for adventure better than anything else.
Childhood stories had filled him with a restless sense of adventure.
Similarexcitement
- 3An event or experience that stands out as remarkable or striking.
The chance meeting with an old friend abroad made for a memorable adventure.
What began as a routine errand became an adventure she retold for years.
Similarexperience, episode, escapade, incident
- 4A text-based or graphical video game built around exploration, puzzle-solving, and narrative progression rather than fast action.
The studio's latest adventure drops players into a haunted mansion full of riddles.
Fans praised the adventure for its branching story and inventive puzzles.
Note
A gamer's shortening of text adventure or adventure game, used alone as the genre's name. Spectrum magazines such as Crash (1984) and Your Sinclair (1988) review titles simply as adventures. Larry Horsfield's The SU Guide to Playing and Writing Adventure Games (1992) tells players to keep pencil and paper ready and draw a map of the adventure as they move. Players had to chart the game's world themselves.
- 5A risky commercial enterprise or speculative venture; goods that a merchant ships on their own account in hope of profit.
He insured the adventure against loss before the cargo left the harbor.
Investors backed the merchant's adventure to the Indies, splitting both the risk and the profit.
Similarventure, speculation, enterprise
- 6To take a chance; to risk something on an uncertain outcome.
Those who will not adventure seldom gain anything worth having.
She chose to adventure, staking everything on the success of the voyage.
Note
Without an object, the verb becomes a writer's polite hedge. In Anthony à Wood's The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford (1792), the author admits a story is "a little out of the road" and then says "I shall adventure to remember it." He means he will risk the digression. The tone is courteous and self-deprecating, and the usage is archaic. Venture is the modern word for it.
- 7To venture upon something; to take the risk of doing or facing it.
Few sailors would adventure such a passage in the dead of winter.
Discriminations might be adventured.
c. 1860, Isaac Taylor, Heads in GroupsNote
Here the object is the deed dared rather than the thing staked, which sets it apart from the "stake something" verb. Often that deed is an infinitive: in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) the travelers "adventured to go back" through dark floodwater. It can even turn passive, as in Isaac Taylor's "Discriminations might be adventured," meaning they might be ventured or risked as claims.
- 8To risk or hazard something; to expose it to possible loss or danger.
She refused to adventure her reputation for so small a reward.
And certain of the chief of Asia, which were his friends, sent unto him, desiring him that he would not adventure himself into the theatre.
1611, The Holy Bible, King James VersionNote
Here the risk falls on what you own or are, not on the deed you attempt. Antonio de Guevara (1557) writes that a citizen adventureth his life, and the King James Bible of 1611 makes it reflexive, begging a man not to adventure himself. Venture now does this work, so this use sounds deliberately old-fashioned. In the "dare" sense, by contrast, the object is the undertaking itself.
- 9The state of being exposed to risk, danger, or peril.
He was in great adventure of his life.
1895, Lord Berners, The Chronicles of FroissartSimilardanger, risk, peril, threat, hazard
Note
Danger as a condition you are in, which explains an old construction: in adventure of. Lord Berners's translation of The Chronicles of Froissart has a man "in great adventure of his life," meaning his life was in jeopardy. A modern reader could easily misread that phrase as a thrilling exploit. The sense is obsolete, and jeopardy or peril now carries it.
- 10The chance or likelihood of incurring danger or loss.
Similarhazard
Note
Here the word measures odds. It means the possibility that something will go wrong, close to hazard in its sense of exposure to loss. It sits naturally beside the merchant's venture, since goods shipped on one's own account carry exactly this chance of loss. The sense is obsolete, and modern English expresses it with hazard or risk.
- 11An event that comes about by chance; a matter of luck or fortune.
By a happy adventure, the messenger arrived just as the gates were closing.
Whatever adventure had scattered the fleet, only three ships reached the harbor.
Similarluck, chance, fortune, accident, serendipity
Note
The meaning that stays closest to the word's origin: Latin adventurus, "about to arrive," which in the Romance languages came to mean "about to happen." An adventure here is simply whatever befalls you, with fortune, luck or hap as near equivalents and no daring implied. It is obsolete, so in modern writing reach for chance or luck. A trace of it survives in the "striking event" meaning.
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Origins
From Middle English aventure, from Old French aventure, from Vulgar Latin *adventūra, from Latin adventūrus ("about to arrive," and in Vulgar Latin "about to happen"), the future participle of adveniō ("to arrive"), which in the Romance languages came to mean "to happen, befall."
From Middle English aventuren, from Old French aventurer, itself from aventure.