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 Spanish equivalent rank of coronel was used by the Spanish tercios in the 16th and 17th centuries. Gonzalo FernÃ¡ndez de CÃ³rdoba, nicknamed 'the Great Captain', divided his armies in 'coronelÃ­as' or colonelcies, each led by a coronel (colonel). However, the Spanish word probably derives from a different origin, in that it appears to designate an officer of the crown (corona, thus the rank coronel), rather than an officer of the column (columna, which would give the word columnal). This makes the Spanish word coronel probably cognate with the English word coroner. As the office of colonel became an established practice, the colonel became the senior captain in a group of companies that were all sworn to observe his personal authority â to be ruled or regimented by him.