All 12 Uses
coincidence
in
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
(Auto-generated)
- By a curious coincidence, "None at all" is exactly how much suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed.†
Chpt 1coincidence = a situation where things happened at the same time by chance even though it was unlikely
- Zaphod Beeblebrox was on his way from the tiny spaceport on Easter Island (the name was an entirely meaningless coincidence—in Galacticspeke, easter means small, flat and light-brown) to the Heart of Gold island, which by another meaningless coincidence was called France.†
Chpt 4
- Zaphod Beeblebrox was on his way from the tiny spaceport on Easter Island (the name was an entirely meaningless coincidence—in Galacticspeke, easter means small, flat and light-brown) to the Heart of Gold island, which by another meaningless coincidence was called France.†
Chpt 4
- One of the side effects of work on the Heart of Gold was a whole string of pretty meaningless coincidences.†
Chpt 4 *coincidences = situations where things happened at the same time by chance even though they were unlikely
- But it was not in any way a coincidence that today, the day of culmination of the project, the great day of unveiling, the day that the Heart of Gold was finally to be introduced to a marveling Galaxy, was also a great day of culmination for Zaphod Beeblebrox.†
Chpt 4coincidence = a situation where things happened at the same time by chance even though it was unlikely
- Today was also his two-hundredth birthday, but that was just another meaningless coincidence.†
Chpt 4
- Ford's father was the only man on the entire planet to survive the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster, by an extraordinary coincidence that he was never able satisfactorily to explain.†
Chpt 5
- Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a fina and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.†
Chpt 6
- By a totally staggering coincidence, that is also the telephone number of an Islington flat where Arthur once went to a very good party and met a very nice girl whom he totally failed to get off with—she went off with a gate-crasher.†
Chpt 8
- Yeah, but that's one wild coincidence, isn't it?†
Chpt 12
- Its crew of four were ill at ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics—as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules.†
Chpt 14
- "Oh, probably just coincidences," said Slartibartfast carelessly.†
Chpt 30coincidences = situations where things happened at the same time by chance even though they were unlikely
Definitions:
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(1)
(coincidence) a situation where two things happened at the same time or in the same way by chance even though it was unlikely
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Much more rarely coincidence can refer to things coinciding (occurring or operating at the same place or time). For example:
- the coincidence of a target and cross hairs
- the coincidence of entangled particles in quantum physics