Question Mark on Safari Icon - it won't start

I'm a newbie to Mac. I purchased my iMac in March. Last night I clicked on the Safari icon in the dock. A question mark overlaid the icon and it wouldn't start. Through Finder I found a command to start (or run) Safari but I got a message that Safari was either disabled or (I believe) deleted.
Sorry for the faulty memory but I have to use my work computer to post. Without Safari, I can't get on the internet at home and I can't seem to download Safari. I'm at my wit's end.

To all who responded,
Thanks so much for your suggestions. It ended up I kind of lucked into an easier solution. I was smart enough to buy a backup drive so when I went into Time Machine I was able to go back a few days and restore Safari.
Still can't figure out what happened. Time Machine told me the last backup (prior to my restoring Safari) failed for some reason. After I restored Safari I instructed Time Machine to do an immediate backup and it went fine.
Don't know if the two are related.
BTW, I'm going to download Firefox so I don't have to worry about this again. Thanks for the suggestion. Two nights I was ruing the fact that I neglected to do so earlier.

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Question Mark on Safari Icon - it won't start

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