Any property, fact, or relation that is the result of chance or is nonessential or nonsubstantive.
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See also: accident (philosophy)
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Beauty is an accident.
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Lexical gaps are called accidental because their existence is by accident; it is not essential.
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This accident, as I call it, of Athens being situated some miles from the sea, which is rather the consequence of its being a very ancient site, […]
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1883, J. P. Mahaffy, Social life in Greece from Homer to Menander:
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If they went through their growth-crisis in other faiths and other countries, although the essence of the change would be the same […], its accidents would be different.
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1902, William James, “Lecture IX: Conversion”, in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature […] , New York, N.Y.; London: Longmans, Green, and Co. […], →OCLC, page 200:
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These cookes how they stamp, and strain, and grind, / And turne substance into accident, / To fulfill all thy likerous talent!
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14thC, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale in The Canterbury Tales,
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But as to Man, all the Fruits of the Earth, all sorts of Herbs, Plants and Roots, the Fishes of the Sea, and the Birds of the Air do not suffice him, but he must disguise, vary, and sophisticate, change the substance into accident, that by such irritations as these, Nature might be provoked, and as it were necessitated.
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1677, chapter 3, in Heraclitus Christianus: or, the Man of Sorrow, page 14:
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Nonetheless, those who have no evidence of the impossibility of the transformation of accident into substance believe that it is death itself which will be actually transformed into a ram on the Day of Resurrection and then be slaughtered.
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1989, Iysa A. Bello, The medieval Islamic controversy between philosophy and orthodoxy, page 55:
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It would also follow that God ought to be able to transmute genera, converting substance into accident, knowledge into ability, black into white, and sound into smell, just as he can turn the inanimate into animate […]
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2005, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Medieval Islamic philosophical writings, page 175:
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nor can God effect the transmutation of substances (from accident into substance, or substance into accident, or substance without accident).