ABSTRACT
An old fairy story, "Three Princes of Serendip," featured frequent marvelous discoveries made by pure chance. Horace Walpole poked fun at this sequence of improbable events by coining the word "serendipity." Two centuries later this word seems to be still gaining popularity and may turn out to be Walpole's most enduring monument. With the single word "serendipitous" we can describe a discovery as accidental while simultaneously expressing a slight suspicion that its accidental nature is a fairy story.
