Dangerous, hazardous or risky: a corpus based study of English synonyms

The study investigates a set of three synonyms, namely dangerous, hazardous, and risky, based on three criteria: senses of meaning, degrees of formality, and collocations. The data of the three synonyms was derived from Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), Merriam-Webster Dictionary, along with the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results indicate that these synonyms differ with respect to the three criteria mentioned above. With regard to the senses of meaning, dangerous implies danger in general, while hazardous and risky may be more specific in meaning; hazardous is connected with people’s health relating to scientific facts, and risky relates to a known and accepted danger, especially in terms of the economy. In terms of their genres, hazardous seems to be the most formal word, as it tends to appear with the highest frequency in academic texts, while dangerous seems to be the least formal word since its frequencies are highest in informal genres, i.e., spoken and TV/movie subtitles. Based on COCA frequency and the MI value (≥ 3), the majority of noun collocates of dangerous are associated with broader and more general themes, whereas most of the noun collocates of hazardous and risky are related to a narrower sense. For this reason, these synonyms are regarded as loose synonyms, as they cannot substitute for each other in all contexts. This corpus-based study not only provides lexical knowledge about the synonyms but also has pedagogical implications. Since a corpus can provide much more insightful lexical knowledge about synonyms than dictionaries, this may encourage English teachers to use corpora as a complementary source, in addition to dictionaries.