Why 'Serendipity' Was Invented by Accident

If you’ve ever called a happy accident “serendipitous,” you were quoting a letter almost nobody was meant to read.

A letter, a fairy tale, three princes

In 1754, the English writer Horace Walpole was writing to a friend, Horace Mann, about a small discovery he’d stumbled into while researching a Venetian coat of arms. He needed a word for that specific feeling — finding something valuable you weren’t looking for — and none existed. So he made one up, and told Mann exactly where he got the idea:

“This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.”

Walpole traced it to a Persian fairy tale he’d read called The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the heroes are constantly “making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” Serendip itself was an old Arabic and Persian name for the island now called Sri Lanka, derived from the Sanskrit Siṃhaladvīpa — “Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island.”

A word that waited 150 years

Here’s the part that would have surprised Walpole: his invented word barely got used for over a century. It stayed a private bit of vocabulary between two correspondents, buried in personal letters, until scholars researching English etymology in the 19th and 20th centuries rediscovered it and started using it publicly.

By the late 20th century, “serendipity” had become common enough that it’s now regularly voted one of the hardest English words to translate — plenty of languages have words for luck, and words for discovery, but few combine both with the specific flavor of pleasant accident while searching for something else entirely.

The irony, obviously

A word describing an unplanned, lucky find spent a century and a half sitting unused in an old letter before someone stumbled onto it by accident. Walpole would probably have appreciated that.