coincidental

UK/ˈkəʊ.ɪn.sɪˌdɛn.tl̩/

adjectiveC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — incident sits at #1,680neutral

Coincidental means happening together purely by chance, not by design. No connection, however it looks.

The phrase any resemblance is purely coincidental is the legal formula printed at the front of novels and films to head off complaints, and it is where most people meet the word. It matters in argument, since two things happening together does not make one cause the other, and dismissing a pattern as coincidental is sometimes right and sometimes exactly what somebody wants you to believe.

Definitions of coincidental

1adjectivecoincidentalResulting from chance rather than from any connection.C1
“The timing was entirely coincidental.”

Also accepted in games: accidental

Where it comes from

From co- + incidental.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 28 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

coincidental in the wild

The structure is not coincidental, and plays an important part in the story.
The Squares of the City
Diipetes are objects, likely meteorite fragments, with coincidental human and animal forms, venerated in Ancient Greece as "thrown by the gods".
Diipetes
In typography, rivers (or rivers of white) are gaps in typesetting which appear to run through a paragraph of text due to a coincidental alignment of spaces.
River (typography)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

← Vocabulary