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[ noun ] a mishap; especially one causing injury or death
Used in print (Bonnie Prudden, "The Dancer and the Gymnast"...)Certainly there would be less anxiety , fewer accidents ( it is the clumsy child who sustains the worst injuries ) , and higher scholastic averages , since alert children work better . (Philip Jos‚ Farmer, The Lovers....)But Mary would soon no_longer be living there , for she would be notified in a_few days that her husband had died in an accident while on a flight to Tahiti . There was no such thing as an `` accident '' . (Evan Esar, Humorous English; a guide to comic ,...)Such items recall the California journalist who reported an accident involving a movie_star : `` The area in which Miss_N - was injured is spectacularly scenic '' . |
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[ noun ] anything that happens by chance without an apparent cause
Synonyms Used in print (Tristram P. Coffin, "Folklore in the American Twentieth...)Nor is it an accident that baseball , growing into the national game in the last 75 years , has become a microcosm of American life , that learned societies such_as the American_Folklore_Society and the American_Historical_Association were founded in the 1880's , or that courses in American literature , American civilization , American anything have swept our school and college curricula . (Frank Getlein and Harold C. Gardiner, S.J., Movies,...)When he came to the movies - more_or_less by accident - they were still cheap entertainment capable of enthralling the unthinking for an idle few minutes . (Brand Blanshard, "The Emotive Theory," Robert...)Indeed we should say , on_the_contrary , that the accident of our later discovery made no difference whatever to the badness of the animal 's pain , that it would have been every whit as bad whether a chance passer-by happened later to discover the body and feel repugnance or not . Related terms |
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