In the past, some confusing claims about the meaning of ‘risk’ have been made in the sociology of risk literature. In this article we present and discuss some empirical data from linguistic corpora that elucidate what risk means in ordinary language. This might provide social scientists with a firmer ground on which to base future statements pertaining to the meaning of risk. After a discussion of the problem, we analyse the word ‘risk’, as both noun and verb, with recourse to three corpora containing over a hundred million contemporary English words. We examine whether or not the meaning of ‘risk’ is stable and consistent across a variety of social contexts to test the commonplace view that ‘risk’ is at times manipulated in ideological ways. Data from the corpora, and the methods of corpus linguistics, therefore suggest ways of reconsidering claims about the meaning(s) of ‘risk’.
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