Definition:
: an assumed gift for finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for
About the Word:
Serendipity was the creation of Horace Walpole, the famed 18th-century English writer, who is known both for authorship of the first Gothic novel in English (The Castle of Otranto) and for having a lifelong obsession with writing letters (more than a thousand of which were to Horace Mann).
In one of these letters to Mann he explained that he came up with the word serendipity and based it on the fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip (Serendip was formerly the name for Ceylon). The protagonists of this tale were in the habit of making happy discoveries, quite by accident.
Example:
"The serendipity of the library had provided me with Pepys’s diaries at the age of fifteen or thereabouts, but soon after, Everyman's made my acquaintance with English literature less fortuitous." — Nadine Gordimer, Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008; 2010
