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🎬
In the Wild
📱 Text to a friend
"omg I wasn't even looking for a used bookstore and I found the exact book on my list. total serendipity"
💼 In a work email
"Running into our old client at the conference — right when we needed a warm intro — was pure serendipity."
🍴 At the dinner table
"We met because I showed up at the wrong platform on the wrong day. That's the whole serendipity of it."
🤔 Everyone Gets This Wrong
Serendipity doesn't just mean "good luck." Winning the lottery isn't serendipity — you were trying to win. Finding a forgotten winning scratch-off in an old coat pocket while looking for your keys? That's serendipity. The word specifically means stumbling onto something good while you were after something else (or nothing at all).
✨ Fun Fact Worth Stealing
In a 2008 poll of 1,000 professional translators, "serendipity" was voted one of the ten hardest English words to translate.
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Use It Today
- Text a friend the next time something lucky happens by accident — not "lucky," not "random." Serendipity.
- Tell the story of how you met your best friend, spouse, or favorite job — out loud, today — and work the word in somewhere. Most of those stories have a serendipity moment hiding in them.
- Next time you find something you weren't looking for — a forgotten $20, the show you didn't mean to start watching — just say the word out loud. It counts.
- Drop it into a work email the next time a lucky coincidence bails you out: "Serendipity struck — turns out Dana already had the file we needed."
Here's a fun twist: this whole word was invented on purpose, by one guy, in a letter — almost 300 years ago, based on a Persian fairy tale most people have never heard of. And you can probably already say it in Spanish, French, and German without realizing it.
Uncover the Backstory →