- accidental
- accidental, casual, fortuitous, contingent, incidental, adventitious. The last five of these words are synonyms of accidental but not always of one another.Accidental denotes simply either happening by chance{
an accidental meeting
}or not of the real or essential nature of a thing{the essential and the accidental values of a college education
}Casual, fortuitous, and contingent come into comparison with accidental in the first of these senses; incidental and adventitious chiefly in the second sense.Casual so strongly stresses absence of prearrangement or premeditation that it tends to obscure the implication of chance{a casual discovery
}{it was no casual re-encounter. He had been enticed into the place . . . with some sinister and perhaps deadly purpose— Froude
}As applied to persons, their actions, their clothes, it often implies heedlessness or indifference{this strange landscape, which seemed so dull to the casual view— Rourke
}{[the rector] had been very casual about visiting his parishioners— Mackenzie
}Sometimes it is the appearance of carelessness or nonchalance and not the reality that is suggested{this sense of an audience made him deliberately casual in his bearing— H. G. Wells
}Fortuitous so strongly implies chance that it sometimes connotes the absence, or seeming absence, of a cause{the good frame of the universe was not the product of chance or fortuitous concourse of particles of matter— Hale
}Contingent implies both possibility and uncertainty, the former because that which is so described may come about, the latter because the outcome is unpredictable owing to the possible operation of chance, of unseen causes, or of the possible influence of unforeseen events. Contingent is therefore always applied to what may come{the contingent advantages of a new law are to be distinguished from those that are immediate and certain
}{men are inclined . . . to resist a truth which discloses the contingent character of their existence— Niebuhr
}{such arguments yield a provisional and contingent justification of moral beliefs— Sat. Review
}Incidental may or may not imply chance; it typically suggests a real and often a designed relationship, but one which is secondary and nonessential. An incidental advantage or gain is one that may have been foreseen or sought after but not regarded as of first importance; incidental expenses are those that must be provided for in a budget because they are normal contingencies though they cannot be enumerated under any of the usual headings{the Irish question is only incidental to the larger question— J. R. Lowell
}{although a great deal is heard about consumer and real estate credit controls, they are incidental to the control of overall bank credit— Eccles/c]
}Incidental sometimes implies contingency that amounts to a strong probability{ills incidental to old age
}{labor problems incidental to rapidly expanding factories— Amer. Guide Series: Mass.
}Adventitious conveys no necessary suggestion of chance but it does imply a lack of essential relationship. Something adventitious does not belong to the original and intrinsic nature of a thing but has been added{in works of imagination and sentiment . . . meter is but adventitious to composition— Wordsworth
}Analogous words: haphazard, *random, hit-or-miss, chance: unintended, undesigned, unpurposed (see affirmative verbs at INTEND): contingent, *dependent, conditionalAntonyms: planned: essential
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
