Nilous
adj.
anxious to imagine how many times you must’ve barely avoided catastrophe—the morning you missed the bus that later went on to crash, the day you stayed onshore when it was a bit too rough out there—which makes it feel like something of a fluke that you’ve survived this long, as if you’re on an unbroken streak of coin flips, heads after heads after heads, wondering when your luck is going to run out.
Old English nigh, almost + nihil, nothing. Pronounced “nahy-lis.”
