Word of the day
Serendipity
/ˌsɛr.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti/
noun
Serendipity is the knack of finding something good while you were looking for something else. It is not blind luck, and it is not the same as a happy accident: the catch is that the finder had to be paying attention. A pharmacist who notices that a failed adhesive sticks just enough to make Post-it notes is being serendipitous. Someone who trips over a banknote on the pavement is just lucky. The word carries a small, warm flavor of curiosity rewarded.
Serendipity is the knack of finding something good while you were looking for something else. It is not blind luck, and it is not the same as a happy accident: the catch is that the finder had to be paying attention. A pharmacist who notices that a failed adhesive sticks just ...
By pure serendipity, she had pulled the right book off the shelf the night before her interview.
Examples
- By pure serendipity, she had pulled the right book off the shelf the night before her interview.
- We met by serendipity at a bus stop in Lisbon and ended up sharing an umbrella, then a flat, then a life.
- The lab notes describe the discovery less as a breakthrough than as the kind of serendipity that only finds prepared minds.
Where it comes from
Serendipity was minted in English on 28 January 1754, in a private letter from the writer and politician Horace Walpole to his friend Horace Mann. Walpole had been reading a Persian fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the heroes were 'always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.' Serendip itself is an old name for the island we now call Sri Lanka, derived through Arabic Sarandib from the Sanskrit Siṃhaladvīpa, meaning the dwelling-place of lions. Walpole stitched the place name to the abstract suffix -ity to label a quality he had no other word for. The coinage stayed buried in private correspondence for nearly a century: the letter was first published in 1833, and serendipity remained obscure throughout the Victorian era. It only became fashionable in the mid-twentieth century, when scientists and sociologists adopted it to describe a particular kind of fertile accident in research. Robert K. Merton wrote a whole book about its travels through scholarly English, charting how a half-forgotten pun became a household word.
Stories around the word
Walpole's word almost did not survive. The Oxford English Dictionary has only one printed citation for it before 1875. What rescued it was twentieth-century science: Alexander Fleming's mold on a Petri dish in 1928, the microwave oven that grew out of a melted chocolate bar in Percy Spencer's pocket at Raytheon in 1945, the Post-it note that began at 3M as a glue too weak to be useful, vulcanized rubber, Teflon, the pacemaker, X-rays, saccharin, and the structure of the benzene ring. Each of these is now told as a parable of serendipity, and each story papers over a great deal of patient work. The sociologist Robert K. Merton spent more than fifty years on the word, eventually publishing The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity in 2004 with co-author Elinor Barber, a manuscript he had finished in the 1950s and held back from print for decades. Merton liked it precisely because it was hard to pin down. He turned it into a working concept in the philosophy of science, distinguishing serendipity proper from pseudo-serendipity, where a sought goal is reached by an unexpected route. In modern popular usage the word has drifted toward sweetness; bookshops, cafés, hotels and the 2001 Cusack-Beckinsale romantic comedy have borrowed it as a name. That softness can flatten the meaning. Walpole's princes did not stumble into wonders. They walked through the world, asked specific questions, and noticed what most travelers would have walked past. The word still rewards readers who keep that older sense in mind, and a small but lively academic literature defends the older meaning against its softer cousin.
Sources and further reading
Common questions
- How do you pronounce serendipity?
- Five syllables: ser-en-DIP-i-ty, with the stress on the third. The first vowel is a short 'e' as in 'send'. Native speakers often run the unstressed syllables together so it sounds closer to 'srn-DIP-i-tee', but stretching all five is perfectly correct and slightly more formal.
- Is serendipity just another word for luck?
- Not quite. Plain luck has no actor: a winning lottery ticket is luck. Serendipity needs a person who is awake enough to recognise a useful surprise in the middle of an unrelated search. The classic distinction is that lucky things happen to anyone, but serendipitous things happen to people who were paying attention.
- What is the plural of serendipity?
- Serendipities exists and appears in scholarly writing, particularly in sociology and the history of science. In everyday English the word is almost always used as a mass noun, like luck or insight, so plurals sound slightly clinical. If you want a casual plural, 'serendipitous moments' is more natural.
- When should I avoid the word?
- Skip it when the discovery was actually planned, or when no discovery was made and you simply got lucky. Calling a careful experimental result serendipitous can sound dismissive of the work; calling a coincidence serendipitous can sound twee. The word earns its keep when there is real surprise plus a real noticing mind.
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