LP,
I put the fail in "" because there are indeed a number of ways an engine can fail ie stops creating thrust.
It seems to me however that there have been very few times (as was mentioned earlier in the thread) when an engine just stopped producing thrust with no apparent damage and was able to be restarted.
The situations that I can think of are the volcanic ash encounters, icing and fuel starvation. Modern engines are extremely reliable and for the most part there is some sort of damage that precipitates the failure.
This is my conjecture of course, which is why I asked if there were any statistics of engine failures as LK had done earlier on with no responses.