Serendipity is the happy accident of finding something wonderful while looking for something else. Pure serendipity, by serendipity, a serendipitous discovery.
The looking matters: serendipity is not luck alone but luck met by somebody prepared to notice, which is why it is invoked so often in accounts of scientific discovery — penicillin being the standard example. Note serendipitous; and that Horace Walpole coined the word in 1754 from a Persian tale about the three princes of Serendip.
1nounserendipityThe happy accident of finding something wonderful while looking for something else.
“It was pure serendipity: I met my future wife when I got on the wrong train.”
serendipity is a happy accident.
seren-DIP-ity → out on an ERRAND, home with better
You went out on an errand and came home with something better than the thing you were sent for.
hooks ontoerrand
Horace Walpole coined it in 1754 from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka, after a tale in which three princes kept making discoveries by accident and sagacity together.
From Serendip + -ity. From Serendip + ity. coined by Horace Walpole in 1754 based on the Persian story of the Three Princes of Serendip, who (Walpole wrote to a friend) were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA