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fortuitous

UK/fɔːˈtjuːɪtəs/US/foɹˈt(j)uətəs/
adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,300 of 15,258neutral

Fortuitous means happening by chance, and often luckily. A fortuitous meeting.

It strictly means accidental rather than fortunate, though the lucky sense has almost won. Careful writers still use fortuitous for chance and fortunate for luck.

Phyzome under the GFDL. · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of fortuitous

  1. 1adjectivefortuitousHappening by chance, and often luckily.C1

    “The whole discovery was fortuitous and took ten years to confirm.”

fortuitous is a quality.

Where it comes from

Latin fortuitus comes from fors, chance, and is unrelated in root to fortunate.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *bʰer- — to bear, carry

  2. Latin

    fortuītus — happening by chance, accidental, random, fortuitous

  3. English, today

    fortuitous

Built from

  • fors · Latin — chance, luck

Learned borrowing from Latin fortuītus (“happening by chance, accidental, random, fortuitous”)., from fortu- (“chance, fortune, luck”) + -ītus. Fortu- is thought to be from fortus, from fors (“chance, luck”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European bʰer- (“to bear, carry”)) + -tus. a doublet of fortuity.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

fortuitous in the wild

  • The fires were contained by 9:30pm, thanks largely to a fortuitous change in the weather and widespread public assistance.

    Black Sunday bushfires

  • However, these facts are based only on a few fortuitous discoveries and some land surface observations of the site.

    Castra of Tihău

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.