FALSE FRIEND: CASUALTY

Good morning / afternoon / evening everyone, depending on when you are reading this. Welcome back to the Daily Vitamin. 

Over the years I have noticed that a lot of my students use the word casualty to mean chance, accident or coincidence. However, in reality casualty means something very different in English: someone who is killed or injured in military action or in an accident. The word that English students are really trying to express is coincidence.

Coincidence means: a situation in which separate things happen in the same way or at the same time by chance.

Consider the following examples that demonstrate the important difference between these words.

Example 1
Since the official "end" or the war in Iraq, there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of casualties; people from both sides are dying almost every day.

Example 2
When I was in Amsterdam last weekend with my wife, I saw my maths teacher from secondary school. I hadn't seen him for years and suddenly he appeared in Amsterdam at the same time we were there. What a coincidence!

Can you come up with your own original sentence(s) with the words CASUALTY and/or COINCIDENCE in them? Post your sentence(s) on one of our social media sites (Facebook or Twitter) and we will give you feedback as soon as possible.

As you can see, these words are very different.

Have a good day.