risk-taking
risk-taking adjective: prone to engaging in risky behaviour or unafraid to do things with uncertain outcomes.
Adjective
risk-taking (comparative more risk-taking, superlative most risk-taking)
- Prone to engaging in risky behaviour or unafraid to do things with uncertain outcomes.
- We're actually quite a risk-taking species, as species go: and because of that we've managed, in the space of little more than 100,000 years, to go from being a bunch of monkeys (hominids, if you want to be strictly correct about this) somewhere in Africa to more or less total world domination. Not...2008, Warwick Cairns, How to Live Dangerously: Why We Should All Stop Worrying, and Start Living, Macmillan, published 2008, →ISBN
- At a cost of an estimated $9 million, The Hire series consists of short movies (five or six minutes) about a risk-taking professional driver driving a BMW.2008, John Vernon Pavlik, Media in the Digital Age, Columbia University Press, published 2008, →ISBN, page 159
Noun
risk-taking (uncountable)
- The practice or tendency of doing things that are risky or have uncertain outcomes.
- Unfortunately, these are the types of risks kids and teens are most likely to take, when risk-taking can seem like a cool way to be independent or escape problems.2007, David E. Woodward, quoted in I've Got This Friend Who: Advice for Teens and Their Friends on Alcohol, Drugs, Eating Disorders, Risky Behavior, and More (ed. Anna Radev), Hazelden (2007), page 48
- They are similar mainly in the characteristics that brought them together—a positive (or negative) attitude toward schoolwork, in the case of the children in Kindermann's study, or a penchant for risk-taking, in the case of the antisocial gangs.2009, Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Free Press, published 2009, →ISBN, page 363
Examples of risk-taking in a sentence
- “We are a risk-taking organization,” Kirk said.2011, Barry Estabrook, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, Andrews McMeel, published 2011...
- During the development era, Koreans seem to have ignored the increase of risks and, at times, appear to have considered high-stakes risk-taking as heroic.2010, Jaeyeol Yee, “Risk Governance in a Double Risk Society: From System Failure to Unknown Complexities”, in Raymond K. H. Chan, Lillian...
Forms of risk-taking
| comparative | more risk-taking |
|---|---|
| superlative | most risk-taking |
| alternative form | risktaking |
Questions about risk-taking
- What does risk-taking mean?
- Risk-taking means prone to engaging in risky behaviour or unafraid to do things with uncertain outcomes.
- How do you use risk-taking in a sentence?
- “We are a risk-taking organization,” Kirk said.
- What part of speech is risk-taking?
- Risk-taking can be an adjective or a noun.
Words near risk-taking in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: risk-taking (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “risk-taking.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/risk-taking. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.