Serendipity

Serendipity

The word serendipity derives from a Persian tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, and comes from the ability possessed by the heroes of the tale to find valuable or agreeable things that they were not looking for. Wikipedia has more on this.

The two tables on this page contain data from the New Model Corpus. With this word occurring a mere 116 times in this corpus, almost every word here co-occurrs only once, which has little statistical value. However, if we combine the data with our intuition, it is not unsatisfying since many of the words relate to each other in a variety of semantic relationships. Note that it occurs a mere 27 times in the BNC.

* this is an excellent example of lexical support.

Serendipitous

Short link: http://bit.ly/maelt_serendipity