Accidental

How to spell accidental

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce accidental

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does accidental mean?

1. adjectiveHappening by chance or unintentionally, rather than being planned.

Accidental in a sentence

• The report blamed the leak on an accidental flick of a switch.

• Her accidental discovery of the old file solved the whole dispute.

Where does accidental come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb accidere, meaning 'to happen' or, more literally, 'to fall upon', which was formed from ad- 'toward' and cadere 'to fall'. The Romans extended the sense of falling into the sense of something befalling a person, that is, an event that simply happens to occur. From accidere came the noun accidens, the source of our 'accident', and the related adjective passed through Old French into English in the late 1300s. The idea baked into the spelling is that an accidental thing 'falls' your way rather than being planned, which is why the same cadere root sits inside words like 'cascade' and 'decadent'. A common spelling trap is the double c followed by the soft 'cid', and the unstressed schwa of the '-dental' ending that tempts writers toward '-dential'.

How the word is built

• ac- (from ad-, toward)
• cid (from Latin cadere, to fall)
• -ent (present participle)
• -al (adjective/noun suffix)