Noun

Feminine gender: la serendipia

1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident

El descubrimiento de la penicilina por Alexander Fleming es un ejemplo clásico de serendipia en la investigación médica.

Borrowed from English “serendipity.”

The English word was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, inspired by the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip (Serendip being an old name for Sri Lanka).

In the story, the princes continually made discoveries of things they were not seeking.

The term entered Spanish relatively recently as a direct borrowing, filling a lexical gap.

This is a relatively modern addition to Spanish vocabulary, most often found in intellectual, literary, or academic contexts.

It frequently appears in discussions about creativity, scientific discovery, or philosophies of life.

In casual conversation, some Spanish speakers may prefer more traditional expressions such as casualidad afortunada (“fortunate coincidence”) or chiripa (“stroke of luck”).

The word is popular in Latin American literature and essays about destiny and chance, and it is often used in psychology and self-help writing to describe life’s unexpected positive turns.