The results of combat or other competition (see also win some, lose some). This expression, at first meaning simply that the issue of battle is uncertain (as Cicero put it in Pro Milone, 52 b.c.), dates from the fifteenth century, when William Caxton used it in his version of one of Aesop’s fables (“fortune of warre”). Later it was transferred to other undertakings in which the outcome is not a certainty.