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The word [勝ち目](http://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?1MUJ@kachime)
means "odds / chance of success". It is made up of two nouns 勝ち and 目.

勝ち obviously means "winning / victory". But what does the kanji 目 mean?

Does 勝ち目 mean something along the lines of "your [_observation_
(eye)](https://www.google.com/search?q=good%20eye) for success"? E.g.
"勝ち目はないよ" meaning _"you have no observation for success"_?
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kanji etymology
What does 目 mean in 勝ち目?
The phoneme _me_ comes from Old Japanese and just like how _mi_ means fruit(実)
and body(身), it had a couple related but not exactly same meanings. For mi,
there were straightforward translations in Chinese for the different uses so
they were able to select two different characters and nobody is confused about
them anymore, but for me they may have had trouble selecting characters for
the different uses and for whatever reason decided to keep them all as 目. So
my message here is that 勝ち目 might have as much to do with 'eyes' as 我が身 has to
do with fruits.

As for the actual answer to your question, I don't really know. I don't think
there is a great deal of consensus for the etymology of many words using 目.
Your random guess for its etymology might as well be accepted because there is
not much evidence for anything else. However, _me_ might have had something to
do with spaced markings for counting things (think of its use as an ordinal
marker) and my random guess is that the number of marks could be related to a
probability.
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2014-01-31T21:11:51.590
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`明鏡国語辞典` has this explanation:

> さいころとばくで、勝ちとなる目の意から。

I.e. `目` refers to the dots/pips on
[dice](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B5%E3%82%A4%E3%82%B3%E3%83%AD).
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2014-01-31T21:25:40.587
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It's "chance" or "clue" of something.

You can think about 目 in 一番目 or 二番目, it represents a step of doing something.

So 勝ち目がない means that you don't have any "chance", "clue" or "can do anything"
for winning.
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