Have you seen this video by comedian Spencer Thompson? In it he gets laughs by getting irate about how people use – and misuse – the word random. However, as OED editor Jesse Sheidlower pointed out in an interview with National Public Radio, not all “misused” words are really misused. The word random has been in the English language for over 600 years and during that time it, like many English words, has gone through evolution in meaning. It’s been used in many ways to mean many things (though the meanings are all more or less related). It started out as a noun meaning “sudden speed, impetuousness” and then became an adjective meaning “without definite purpose” a few hundred years later. As you can see, both of these meanings retain the general sense of what we commonly think of as random today. You might think of a rabbit suddenly darting away in what looks to you like a random direction, or a person wandering randomly through a park.

Thompson bases his criticism on a more precise definition of the word, when it’s used to indicate a completely impersonal and statistically average selection of a few specific things (or people) from a larger general group. The Merriam-Webster dictionary has four different definitions for the adjective random, and his definition is the last on the list:

#1: Without a definite plan or purpose.
#2: Done or chosen haphazardly.
#3: Relating to events with definite probability of occurrence.
#4: Relating to a set of elements, each of which is equally probable to occur.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be careful about how we use words, because even when different definitions of a word are similar, they can have quite different nuances in meaning. When you’re working on vocabulary study, be sure to look carefully at all of the common definitions of a word and make sure you know how to use each correctly. Communication is definitely not something that you want to do haphazardly!