Meaning
The occurrence of happy or valuable discoveries made by accident rather than by design; also the ability to find agreeable things one was not looking for. The word carries a warm, favorable tone and has drifted toward plain lucky chance, losing some of coiner Horace Walpole's original emphasis on accident combined with personal sagacity. Warmly positive and slightly literary; often paired with 'pure', 'sheer', or 'stroke of'. Regional use: General English (coined by Horace Walpole, England, 1754).
Origin
Horace Walpole, English writer and collector, coined the word in a letter dated January 28, 1754, to his friend Horace Mann, after making a lucky find about the coat of arms on a painting Mann had sent him. He formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, published in English in 1722, whose heroes, in Walpole's words, 'were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of'. Serendip was an old name for Sri Lanka, from Arabic Sarandib and ultimately Sanskrit 'Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island'. The word stayed rare for about 150 years: a Saturday Review article of 1877 noted it had been largely forgotten, and it was still missing from a major English dictionary as late as 1902 before spreading in twentieth-century scientific and popular use; the adjective serendipitous followed in 1914.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- serendipities
- serendipitous
- serendipitously
Usage Examples
- Meeting my future business partner on the delayed train was pure serendipity.
- The drug's most important effect emerged through serendipity rather than the planned trials.
- By a stroke of serendipity, the archive she visited for one manuscript also held the letters she had spent years hunting.