![]() Somewhat surprisingly, despite its archaic, antiquated ring, its usage (after plateauing at a low rate for its first half a century as a linguistic new-born) has soared since around 1920, reaching a peak in around 2007.I think, perhaps, we rather like having such pretty (and slightly pretentious) alternative to ‘coincidence’ and ‘chance’. n. That was pretty etymologically heavy.Īnyhow, after our ingenious 19 th century friend coined the term, its use has continued to increase. Ad-free experience & advanced Chrome extension. Tags of 'happenstance' as a synonym for 'haphazard' Suggest tags. This developed into ‘circumstantia’ which, by a linguistic happenstance, combined with the Old French ‘ciconstance’ to form the Middle English ‘circumstance’.) of 'happenstance' as a synonym for 'haphazard' Suggest part of speech. ‘Circum’ meant ‘around’ and ‘stare’ meant ‘stand’, breeding ‘circumstare’, meaning to ‘encircle’ or ‘encompass’. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word. ![]() But ‘circumstance’, the kill joy, has distinctly Latin derivations. 1964, , James Bond: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. (uncountable) The chance or random quality of an event or circumstance. We were pretty close, since ‘happen’ actually came into late Middle English, superseding the simpler Middle English verb ‘hap’, when the English noun ‘hap’ and ‘en’ suffix – derived from the old English ‘nian’ suffix which had Germanic origins – combined to form a new verb. Synonyms for fortuity include luck, fortune, accident, kismet, fluke, happenstance, blessing, fortuitousness, fortunateness and lucky break. ( en noun ) (countable) A chance or random event or circumstance. (Well, of course there are always Latin origins if you go back far enough. happenstance, concomitant, alignment, conjunctive Synonyms, Antonyms & Associated Words Rate these synonyms: 0. No fancy Latin origins this time both of its forming words came from English. Around 1857 (its first known use according to Merriam and Webster) some clever chap decided to blend ‘happen’ and ‘circumstance’ to create ‘happenstance’, and around the turn of the century a bunch of other people decided that was a nice idea, and decided to use it too. It’s etymology, too, is relatively straightforward. ![]() So it’s essentially a synonym for ‘circumstance’ or ‘chance’, with a slightly more positive connotation. It’s pretty versatile, and can be used with or without an article (‘it was an agreeable happenstance’ or simply ‘our meeting was happenstance’), or following the preposition ‘by’, as in ‘we met by happenstance’. The Cambridge Dictionary adds ‘especially one producing a good result’. Happenstance: (noun) a circumstance, especially that is due to chance chance or a chance situation coincidence. Phrase thesaurus through replacing words with similar meaning of Fortunate and Happenstance. Happenstance – A (Nearly) Homegrown Favourite
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