Other forms: safeties
Safety is being out of reach of harm — nothing about to hurt you. A hand held tight at the kerb, a hard hat on a building site, the porch light left on until everybody is inside.
Safety is also the whole subject: road safety, fire safety, food safety, a safety inspection, a safety officer with a clipboard. In compounds it names the thing that does the protecting — safety belt, safety pin, safety net, safety catch, safety glasses. The fixed phrases run through announcements everywhere: for your own safety, in the interests of safety, please make your way to safety. It is uncountable, so there is no "a safety" and no safeties; the adjective is safe and the adverb safely.
1nounsafetyThe state of being protected from harm or danger.~46%
“They waited until the last of the children had reached safety.”
2nounfreeHow free from danger something is, treated as a subject or a standard.~52%
“The report raised hard questions about food safety.”
3nouncatchA catch or device that stops something from operating by accident.~2%
“He put the safety back on before handing the rifle over.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
safety is a state of being protected.
Safety comes from the word for whole and unhurt. Middle English savete came from Old French sauveté, earlier salvetet, from Medieval Latin salvitās, and behind all of them stands Latin salvus — the same root that gives English salvage and salvation.
Latin
salvus
Medieval Latin
salvitās
Old French
sauveté
Middle English
savete
English, today
safety
Middle English savete, from Old French sauveté, from earlier salvetet, from Medieval Latin salvitās, salvitātem, from Latin salvus.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA