Luck - Lucky - Lucki.es - Luckiest

Luck or fortuity is good or bad fortune in life caused by accident or chance, and attributed by some to reasons of faith or superstition, which happens beyond a person's control.

The term "luck" is pervasive in common speech. There are at least two senses people usually mean when they use the term, the proscriptive sense and the descriptive sense. In the proscriptive sense, luck is the supernatural and deterministic concept that there is a force which proscribes that certain events occur very much the way the laws of physics will proscribe that certain events occur. It is the proscriptive sense that people mean when they state that they "do not believe in luck." In the descriptive sense, luck is merely a descriptive name we give to events after they occur which we find to be fortuitous.

Cultural views of luck vary from perceiving luck as a matter of random chance to attributing to luck explanations of faith or superstition. For example, the Romans believed in the embodiment of luck as the goddess Fortuna, while the atheist and philosopher Daniel Dennett believes that "luck is mere luck" rather than a property of a person or thing.

Lucky symbols have widespread global appeal and are represented by human, animal, botanical and inanimate objects. They are always meaning a form of superstition.

Etymology and Definition

The English noun luck appears comparatively late, during the 1480s, as a loan from Low German (Dutch or Frisian) luk, a short form of gelucke (Middle High German gelücke). It likely entered English as a gambling term, and the context of gambling remains detectable in the word's connotations; luck is a way of understanding a personal chance event. Luck has three aspects which make it distinct from chance or probability.

* Luck is good or bad.
* Luck is by accident or chance.
* Luck applies to a person.

Some examples of luck:

* You win repeatedly at gambling, against significant odds.
* You correctly guess an answer in a quiz which you didn't know.
* Your car breaking down could be bad luck, if it was by chance and against the odds.

Before the adoption of luck at the end of the Middle Ages, Old English and Middle English expressed the notion of "good fortune" with the word speed (Middle English spede, Old English sp?d); speed besides "good fortune" had the wider meaning of "prosperity, profit, abundance"; it is not associated with the notion of probability or chance but rather with that of fate or divine help; a bestower of success can also be called speed, as in "Christ be our speed" (William Robertson, Phraseologia generalis, 1693).

The notion of probability was expressed by the Latin loanword chance, adopted in Middle English from the late 13th century, literally describing an outcome as a "falling" (as it were of dice), via Old French cheance from Late Latin cadentia "falling". Fortuna, the Roman goddess of fate or luck, was popular as an allegory in medieval times, and even though it was not strictly reconcilable with Christian theology, it became popular in learned circles of the High Middle Ages to portray her as a servant of God in distributing success or failure in a characteristically "fickle" or unpredictable way, thus introducing the notion of chance or randomness. (wikipedia)