serendipity
/ˌsɛr(ə)nˈdɪpɪti
/- I don't worry about surveillance as much as I worry that chance encounters and serendipity may disappear.
- Evolution seems to proceed not by design but by chance and serendipity.
- While there is appeal in the spontaneity and serendipity of these events, they do not amount to community.
Synonyms
Origin
1754: coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’.
The delightful word serendipity, meaning ‘the occurrence of events by chance in a beneficial way’, was invented by the writer and politician Horace Walpole before or at the beginning of 1754, from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka. Walpole was a prolific letter writer, and he explained to one of his main correspondents that he had based the word on the title of a fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’.