Log in or Sign up

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

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

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. 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.

Wiktionary

  1. n. An unsought, unintended, and/or unexpected discovery and/or learning experience that happens by accident and sagacity.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries

Etymologies

  1. 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.

Examples

  • “The word serendipity comes from the Persian fairy tale”

    The Huffington Post: Kari Stoever: 720 Saturdays and a Silver Dollar

  • “On January 28, 1754, Horace Walpole coined the term serendipity, which means finding something you're not looking for but which you nonetheless need.”

    Fleshbot

  • “The word "serendipity" comes from the Persian fairy tale "The Three Princes of Serendip," whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

    The Huffington Post: Kari Stoever: 720 Saturdays and a Silver Dollar

  • “Put another, metaphorical way, American writers tend toward an expressive register commensurate with the open spaces and endless distances of our continent; Perec's magnitude is no less great, but his vastness is essentially urban, highly structured, and by necessity constrained, entailing complex negotiations and yielding delight in serendipity, surprise, and incongruity.”

    Art and Culture

  • “Cooperation with other more northerly atmospheric weather patterns or oscillations and a little serendipity is needed to get an exceptionally snowy winter.”

    The Washington Post: Why was last year so snowy? Part I

  • “The accidental discovery of a new idea is called serendipity.”

    Simon & Schuster: Diffusion of Innovations

  • “Not to actually equate Alberta's avarice in serendipity with slavery, of course.”

    i'm just saying

  • “Sometimes serendipity is a factor in the projects I pick.”

    SBQOTW

  • “You can read Chapter 1 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science, by Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, here From the names of cruise lines and bookstores to an Australian ranch and a nudist camp outside of Atlanta, the word serendipity—that happy blend of wisdom and luck by which something is discovered not quite by accident—is today ubiquitous.”

    languagehat.com: LINKS FROM ALDI.

  • “This was also my first exercise in serendipity, (the art of looking for something and finding something else), because I was not after a mercury lamp but after a cadmium lamp, and that was not a success.”

    Dennis Gabor - Autobiography

Show 10 more examples...

Log in or sign up to add your own related words.

Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘serendipity’.

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • mattaustin I found this word in an article called "Three days in the Sri Lanka", by Nathan Myers. It is used in the sentence as followed, "Sri Lanka in Arabic is called serendib meaning serendipity." Sep 22, 2010

  • gangerh It would be an unexpected stroke of luck to find that 103 other Wordies listed this word for the first time today before a certain other word was listed again. Sep 15, 2009

  • tonybreed It looks like all of the "how it's used" examples are taken from the 1999 movie "Dogma", where Serendipity was the name of Salma Hayak's character. Unfortunately, this give no sense of how the word is used.

    Mar 26, 2009

  • milosrdenstvi The opposite being zemblanity. Mar 17, 2009

  • Telofy Bodhi, serendipity is our Lucksmith. Oct 13, 2008

  • bodhi Ohmygod this word is so foul. So sticky. Ugh. Oct 13, 2008

  • kewpid Oh wait, never mind, I've worked it out Jun 16, 2008

  • kewpid What's the not-nice one, bilb? Jun 16, 2008

  • bilby The nice s-word. Jun 16, 2008

  • languageandhumor If "The Three Princes of Serendip" had been written much later, John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale could have starred in "Ceylonity" or even "Srilankanity." Feb 25, 2008

  • pxsarkany I recall it was because the Brothers from Serendip always got lucky, because they were in the right place at the right time.

    Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Princes_of_Serendip, it's really cool Nov 23, 2007

  • muamor We have absolutely nothing like that in Finnish. Life moves in serendipitous ways. Which is good. Jun 25, 2007

  • copywriter Oh, how I wonder how popular this word is... Feb 19, 2007

  • haguremetaru Like the mooV
    Dec 9, 2006

  • dbmag9 Why are the forces for the universe set the way they are? Why am I so happy? Why did I catch the train today? Some will say that these are merely coincidences that had to happen to somebody. But others will reply: Yes, but they didn't have to happen to us. That there is so much happiness in our world; that we have these little, fortuitous, coincidences; truly, we have serendipity. Dec 2, 2006

  • seanahan Like the island. Dec 2, 2006

‘serendipity’ has been looked up 8697 times, loved by 100 people, added to 380 lists, commented on 17 times, and has a Scrabble score of 17.