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.
The \k\ sound is sometimes spelled with qu in words of Spanish origin. This is especially true when the vowel sound that follows is long a (\Ä\), long e (\Ä\), or short i (\i\). Quesadilla and conquistador (in its pronunciations with and without the \s\ sound) are examples from our list.