A Word on the Words: There’s a difference between fortunate and fortuitous

IF a £10 note fell out of your sofa as you carried it out to throw in a skip, that’s fortunate.

It is also fortuitous.

But fortunate and fortuitous don’t mean the same thing.

Fortunate has an element of good luck to it – you benefit from the fortunate things happen to you. You have acquired, won or been bestowed with something better than others.

It comes from the Latin fortunatus, meaning prospered, lucky or happy.

But fortuitous merely means a thing happens in a random manner, it doesn’t actually have to be a good thing.

Fortuitous comes from the Latin forte, meaning “by chance”.

Like many words, however, fortuitous is undergoing a change in meaning.

I think this is merely because it sounds a bit like fortunate and so people trying to be clever (but failing) have been using it instead of fortunate.

It’s another example of the language contracting. Bad usage is winning. Again.

If fortuitous and fortunate come to mean exactly the same thing, then there will be no point in having both of them.

The vocabulary available to English speakers is poorer for this. That’s not fortunate.