Fortunate is the formal word for lucky. Fortunate to be alive, a fortunate escape, we were fortunate.
It is used for outcomes rather than for people who win things: a fortunate coincidence, fortunate timing. Fortunately is very common as a sentence adverb — fortunately nobody was hurt. The less fortunate is a standard polite phrase for people in poverty. Note fortune, meaning both luck and wealth; misfortune; and fortune-teller, where fortune means what is going to happen to you rather than what you own.
1adjectivefortunateHaving good luck.
“They were fortunate that anybody was watching at all.”
synonyms: lucky, blessed
fortunate is a state of good luck.
Also accepted in games: lucky
Latin fortunatus comes from Fortuna, the goddess of chance, whose wheel turned without regard to merit. That image — the wheel of fortune — governed medieval thinking about luck and survives in the phrase and in the word.
Latin
fortūnātus
Middle English
fortunat — fortunate
English, today
fortunate
From Middle English fortunat (“fortunate”), from Latin fortūnātus, from fortūna + -ātus, see -ate. See also Middle English fortunaten (“to assure the success (of), make fortunate”); cognate with French fortuné (“lucky”). by surface analysis, fortune + -ate.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA