| / English Dictionary |
BY CHANCE
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (adverb)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Without advance planning
Example:
they met accidentally
Synonyms:
accidentally; by chance; circumstantially; unexpectedly
Classified under:
Sense 2
Meaning:
By accident
Example:
betrayed by a word haply overheard
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Sense 3
Meaning:
Through chance
Example:
To sleep, perchance to dream...
Synonyms:
by chance; perchance
Classified under:
Adverbs
Domain usage:
archaicism; archaism (the use of an archaic expression)
Context examples:
The neighbourhood was not large, but the Musgroves were visited by everybody, and had more dinner-parties, and more callers, more visitors by invitation and by chance, than any other family.
(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)
Her visits there, beginning by chance, were continued by solicitation.
(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)
Martin had encountered his sister Gertrude by chance on Broadway—as it proved, a most propitious yet disconcerting chance.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
Often aneurysms are found by chance during tests done for other reasons.
(Aneurysms, NIH: National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute)
The statistical probability of the number of alignments that are expected to occur by chance, in a database of a given size, with a score greater than or equal to the BLAST raw score.
(BLAST E-Value, NCI Thesaurus)
The method identifies those regions of the genome that are aberrant more often than would be expected by chance, with greater weight given to high-amplitude events (high-level copy-number gains or homozygous deletions) that are less likely to represent random aberrations.
(GISTIC, NCI Thesaurus)
A box by chance?
(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
A statistical technique which helps in making inference whether three or more samples might come from populations having the same mean; specifically, whether the differences among the samples might be caused by chance variation.
(Analysis of Variance, NCI Thesaurus)
And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, least by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there.
(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
I have told you, reader, that I had learnt to love Mr. Rochester: I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me—because I might pass hours in his presence, and he would never once turn his eyes in my direction—because I saw all his attentions appropriated by a great lady, who scorned to touch me with the hem of her robes as she passed; who, if ever her dark and imperious eye fell on me by chance, would withdraw it instantly as from an object too mean to merit observation.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
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