accident
/ˈaksɪd(ə)nt
/- He said data from accidents and damage incidents is collected and used to tailor officer and staff training to improve safety and cut down costs.
- Air accident investigators say the incident was ‘serious’ and are checking instructions from air traffic control.
- Each year, more than 37,000 women die from accidents.
Synonyms
- Currently the only call-outs that Grassington does not cover are road traffic accidents and aircraft crashes because it does not have the specialist cutting equipment required.
- Each year more than 200 people are rescued from vehicles involved in road accidents in North Yorkshire, a greater number than those rescued from fires.
- ‘All staff responding to road traffic accidents should thoroughly search vehicles,’ he said.
Synonyms
- As a result, they welcomed successful accidents and chance events.
- Thus, accidents or chance events function as sites around which narratives of individual difference can collocate.
- Perhaps it was no accident that the two events coincided, since the association between oysters and sex has been so hackneyed as to become an embarrassing cliché.
Synonyms
- By accident of birth, most, but not all American leaders, were born in the United States.
- And so now by pure accident of birth, I'm alive at a time where science is about to figure this out.
- All to make sure that the children get the opportunities they were denied by mere accident of birth.
Synonyms
- It does not tell me that I am a substance (that is, an independently existing object) as opposed to an accident or property.
- The sensory qualities of such an object are therefore no more than passing accidents, through which its essence is dimly and confusedly perceived.
Phrases
accident and emergency
an accident waiting to happen
accidents will happen in the best regulated families
by accident
without accident
Origin
Late Middle English (in the general sense 'an event'): via Old French from Latin accident- 'happening', from the verb accidere, from ad- 'towards, to' + cadere 'to fall'.
An accident was originally ‘an event, something that happens’, not necessarily a mishap. It came into English via Old French, ultimately from Latin cadere, meaning ‘to fall’, which also gave us words such as cadaver (Late Middle English) ‘someone fallen’, chance, decay (Late Middle English) ‘fall away’, incident (Late Middle English) ‘fall upon’ so ‘happen’; and occasion (Late Middle English). The idea of an event ‘falling’ remains in the English word befall (Old English). Later the meaning of accident evolved into ‘something that happens by chance’, as in the phrase a happy accident. By the 17th century the modern meaning had become established in the language. The full form of the proverb accidents will happen, which dates from the early 19th century, is accidents will happen in the best-regulated families. According to Mr Micawber in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1850): ‘Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by…the influence of Woman, in the lofty character of Wife, they must be expected with confidence, and must be borne with philosophy.’ See also adventure
- double bogey
- double boiler
- double bond
- double-book
- double-breasted
- double bridle
- double-check
- double chin
- double-chinned
- double-click
- double-clutch
- double coconut
- double concerto
- double convict
- double cream
- double-cross
- double-crosser
- double-cut
- double-cut roll
- double dagger
- double date
- Doubleday, Abner
- double-dealer
- double-dealing
- double-decker