accidental

adjective

1)

an accidental meeting

Syn:

fortuitous, chance, adventitious, fluky, coincidental, casual, serendipitous, random; unexpected, unforeseen, unanticipated, unlooked-for, unintentional, unintended, inadvertent, unplanned, unpremeditated, unthinking, unwitting

Ant:

intentional

2)

the location is accidental and contributes nothing to the poem

Syn:

incidental, unimportant, by the way, by the by, supplementary, subsidiary, subordinate, secondary, accessory, peripheral, tangential, extraneous, extrinsic, irrelevant, nonessential, inessential

Ant:

deliberate

••

accidental, adventitious, casual, contingent, fortuitous, incidental

Things don't always go as planned, but there are many ways to describe the role that chance plays. Accidental applies to events that occur entirely by chance (an accidental encounter with the candidate outside the men's room); but it is so strongly influenced by the noun "accident" that it carries connotations of undesirable or possibly disastrous results (an accidental miscalculation of the distance he had to jump). A casual act or event is one that is random or unpremeditated (a casual conversation with her son's teacher in the grocery store), in which the role that chance plays is not always clear. Something that is incidental may or may not involve chance; it typically refers to what is secondary or nonessential (incidental expenses in the budget) or what occurs without design or regularity (incidental lighting throughout the garden). Adventitious also implies the lack of an essential relationship, referring to something that is a mere random occurrence (adventitious circumstances that led to victory). In contrast, contingent points to something that is entirely dependent on an uncertain event for its existence or occurrence (travel plans that are contingent upon the weather). Fortuitous refers to chance events of a fortunate nature; it is about as far as one can get from accidental (a fortuitous meeting with the candidate outside the men's room just before the press conference).