hazard vs toss-up

hazard

noun
  • A game of chance played with dice, usually for monetary stakes; popular mainly from 14th c. to 19th c. 

  • An obstacle or other feature which causes risk or danger; originally in sports, and now applied more generally. 

  • A problem with the instruction pipeline in CPU microarchitectures when the next instruction cannot execute in the following clock cycle, potentially leading to incorrect results. 

  • The act of potting a ball, whether the object ball (winning hazard) or the player's ball (losing hazard). 

  • Chance. 

  • An obstacle or other feature that presents a risk or danger that justifies the driver in taking action to avoid it. 

  • The side of the court into which the ball is served. 

  • The chance of suffering harm; danger, peril, risk of loss. 

  • A sand or water obstacle on a golf course. 

verb
  • To expose to chance; to take a risk. 

  • To risk (something); to venture, incur, or bring on. 

toss-up

noun
  • The toss of a coin used to decide some issue. 

  • A decision in which neither choice is clearly favorable or unfavorable, or for which the outcome does not matter. 

  • Either of two outcomes that are equally likely. 

How often have the words hazard and toss-up occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )