accidental
IPA: æksʌdˈɛntʌɫ
noun
- A property which is not essential; a nonessential; anything happening accidentally.
- (painting, plural only) Those fortuitous effects produced by luminous rays falling on certain objects so that some parts stand forth in abnormal brightness and other parts are cast into a deep shadow.
- (music) A sharp, flat, or natural, occurring not at the commencement of a piece of music as the signature, but before a particular note.
- Part of a text that has a mainly structural purpose, such as spelling, punctuation, or capitalization.
adjective
- Pertaining to accident and not essence; thus, inessential; incidental; secondary.
- (philosophy) Nonessential to something's inherent nature (especially in Aristotelian thought).
- (music) Adjusted by one or two semitones, in temporary departure from the key signature.
- Occurring sometimes, by chance; occasional.
- Happening by chance, or unexpectedly; taking place not according to the usual course of things; by accident, unintentional.
- (geometry) Being a double point with two distinct tangent planes in 4-dimensional projective space.
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Examples of "accidental" in Sentences
- They were ennobled accidentally.
- I accidentally thumped the floor.
- She accidentally smirched the car.
- The man accidentally rang the tocsin.
- The girl accidentally smashed the vase.
- The man accidentally treads on the cat.
- The engineer blowed a fuse accidentally.
- She is accidentally shot in the crossfire.
- The change in the first line was accidental.
- And so, these are what I call accidental guerillas.
- Maybe the accidental and the deliberate events occur simultaneously.
- Nor again (b) will ‘white’ have another term accidental to it, e.g. ‘musical’.
- "When I came across these answers, which I call the 'accidental discovery,' I wasn't seeking the information," Piccirillo told ABCNews.com.
- Its curves are arbitrary, and what we call accidental, but one after another follows it as if he were guided by a chart on which it was laid down.
- Reporters soon adopted the phrase accidental attack, a description that frustrated Pentagon officials, who felt it minimized the ferocity of the sustained assault that had killed or injured two out of every three men on board.
- And as to the mechanic also -- the carpenter, the mason, the blacksmith, the tool-maker of any kind -- there are a thousand circumstances, which we call accidental, that mingle their influence in giving quality and durability to their work, and prevent us from making
- It is natural to conclude, therefore, that they have some hidden property which saves them from attack; and it is easy to see that when any other insects, by what we call accidental variation, come more or less remotely to resemble them, the latter will share to some extent in their immunity.
- In 2007, Greg Parks was prepping his kids for the Florida state test, but in what he calls an accidental peek at the test, the middle-school math teacher noticed a troubling choice of words: Instead of asking kids about the volume of a can — the example he and the textbooks had been using — the test asked about the volume of a swimming pool.