Phenomena of a failure

In our lives we meet many events which have very diverse causes, mechanisms of development and consequences. We frequently work with the events´ description besides other assessments in safety/risk assessment. In pure technical applications these events are related with failure occurrence of equipment, a device, a system or an item. The theory speaks about failure itself, its mechanisms, circumstances of occurrence, etc. but at the same time we need appropriate terminology to describe these conditions. Our basic approaches into observing, dealing and handling failure may fall into two groups. We either talk about a probabilistic approach or about a deterministic (logic) approach. As we need to get some information about a failure we need to find it or transfer it from different sources. The contribution gives a small piece of very complex problematic of the term “failure” and its related characteristics. There are mentioned functions of an object and their description, classification of failures, main characteristics of failure, possible causes of failure, mechanisms of failure and consequences of failure and also other contributions related with failure very closely. The paper also deals with possible information sources which may inform us more on failure, and not only on typical characteristic.