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by Kate Woodford

This week’s blog post is a companion to one that I published last month on ways of talking about luck. Today’s post focuses on the language of chance – that force that makes things happen without any obvious cause.

Let’s start with the word chance itself.  We say that surprising things happen by chance when they are not planned or intended:

They’d moved to the same area purely by chance.

Chance is also used with this meaning as an adjective. It is always put before a noun, especially ‘meeting’ or ‘encounter’:

A chance meeting with the comic actor led to their hugely successful partnership.

We use other adjectives for things that happen by chance, the most common of which is random. Random describes something that happens or is chosen without a particular plan or pattern. We also talk about doing something at random:

The findings were based on a random sample of 5,000 adults.

The winner will be selected at random.

A near-synonym of random is arbitrary, which often has a rather disapproving connotation:

She warned against setting arbitrary deadlines.

Conversely, an adjective in this area with a very positive meaning is fortuitous. Something that is fortuitous happens by chance but is fortunate, having a positive result. The lovely adjective serendipitous has a very similar meaning, but is often used in the context of finding and discovering things:

With this issue very much in the news, the timing of the movie’s release was fortuitous.

This was one of several serendipitous discoveries that we made along the way.

A noun very much in the area of chance is coincidence. It refers to two things that happen at the same time or to the same people in a way that is unlikely and surprising. We may introduce an example of this with the phrase by coincidence and, for emphasis, we often use adjectives such as sheer and pure:

By coincidence, I was in Paris for a conference while Luca was visiting his brother.

By sheer coincidence, we’d both bought exactly the same coat the week before.

Something good and surprising that happens by chance and involves no intention or skill can be informally called a fluke. We also use the informal adjective fluky/flukey to describe such a thing:

It was just a fluke that I got the ball in the net.

There was nothing fluky about her winning shot.

Finally, if you happen to do something, you do it by chance:

I just happened to walk by the café as they were pinning the notice up in the window.

That concludes my post on the language of chance. May the week ahead be full of fortuitous coincidences and serendipitous discoveries!