Chancy comes from chance + the adjectival suffix -y. Chance derives from Old French cheance ('a falling, an event'), from Vulgar Latin *cadentia, from Latin cadere ('to fall'). The historical trail runs through cheance in Old French, cadere in Latin, and *ḱad- in Proto-Indo-European. Morphologically, chancy is transparent: it draws on chance + the adjectival suffix -y. Used as an adjective, chancy now means "uncertain in outcome; risky", so the present definition can be read against the older forms and meanings. The same lexical family is also visible in derived forms such as chancily and chanciness and related forms such as chance. The result is a borrowed or transmitted form whose modern spelling carries a compact record of its route into English.