fortuitous or fortunate? Primarily, and from its origins, fortuitous means ‘occurring by chance’: I had no idea she was going to be there; our meeting was entirely fortuitous. In modern writing and speech fortuitous has also come to mean ‘happening refer to things that happen by good fortune’:, not simply by chance (The event could not have happened at a more fortuitous time. T), but t his is a usage that traditionalists seek to avoid. Fortunate, by contrast, means ‘lucky’ or ‘auspicious’