Horace Walpole is credited with inventing the word serendipity. In a letter to Horace Mann on January 28, 1754, after having read The Three Princes of Serendip (author unknown, but sometimes incorrectly credited to Walpole):
. . . this discovery indeed is almost of that kind which I call serendipity, a very expressive word, which as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavor to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right--now do you understand serendipity?
This quote is from p. 6 of Remer, Theodore G. Serendipity and the three princes: from the Peregrinnaggio of 1557. University of Oklahoma Press, 1965.
The information and quote was related in a 4-11-1994 email send by Joy Pohlman, Yale University, to the LIS-L (Library and Information Science Student Discussion Group) email listserv.
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