World of the word: serendipity

Pronunciations

serendipity

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

• n. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
• n. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
• n. An instance of making such a discovery.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

• n. An unsought, unintended, and/or unexpected discovery and/or learning experience that happens by accident and sagacity.
• n. A combination of events which are not individually beneficial, but occurring together produce a good or wonderful outcome.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

• n. The happy faculty, or luck, of finding, by “accidental sagacity,” interesting items of information or unexpected proofs of one's theories; discovery of things unsought: a factitious word humorously invented by Horace Walpole.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• n. good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries

Etymologies

From the characters in the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, who made such discoveries, from Persian Sarandīp, Sri Lanka, from Arabic sarandīb.

(American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Serendip +‎ -ity. Coined by Horace Walpole, 1754. See Serendib.

Same context

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