Princeton's WordNet (3.00 / 2 votes) Rate this definition: safety (noun). the state of being certain that adverse effects will not be caused by some agent under defined conditions. insure the safety of the children; the reciprocal of safety is risk.
Conversely, the Spanish were also pronouncing it the same way, but with a different etymological origin! The Spanish understood the word âcoronelâ as the officer of the âcrownâ rather than that of the âcolumnâ. It is possible that both the French and the Spanish pronunciation affected the English one. The English had already begun to use the word âcoronelâ, which became bastardized by their accent to be pronounced as âkernelâ, with an open ambiguous ârâ in the middle overshadowing the âoâ.
If the short i pronunciation should stick (I personally doubt it), the spelling will likely eventually change, but (at least in Southern California) it doesn't seem to be predominant, so that's why we stick with the long i pronunciation and the single m.he short 'i' tends to be used in American English, referring to the introductory textbooks. I have heard it quite often from good quality US media outlets (NPR etc.) so would assume it is regarded as standard. The British English is pronounced with a long 'i' (as in miner).