accident

1. 1.

   an unfortunate mishap; especially one causing damage or injury

   Broadermishap

   Narrowercollisioncrashinjuryshipwreckfatal accident
2. 2.

   anything that happens suddenly or by chance without an apparent cause

   “winning the lottery was a happy accident”

   “the pregnancy was a stroke of bad luck”

   “it was due to an accident or fortuity”

   Synonymsstrokefortuitychance event

   Broaderhappening

   Narrowerhapbreakcoincidencelottery

Other forms of accident

plural

accidents·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about accident

What does accident mean?

accident means "an unfortunate mishap; especially one causing damage or injury". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in accident?

accident has 3 syllables: ac-ci-dent. The stress falls on "ac". In IPA it is /ˈæksədənt/.

What is another word for accident?

Close synonyms include stroke, fortuity, chance event. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is accident a common word?

accident is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.