Incident | Vocabulary | Khan Academy

Hey wordsmiths! Let me introduce you to a spectacular new word. It's—oh, oh dear! There's been an incident. Uh, this Manatee has taken several bites out of the word spectacular. Well fine, uh, we are nothing if not flexible here at Khan Academy. So let us instead pivot to the word incident itself.

It's a noun. It means an unforeseen and usually bad thing that happens, like a manatee taking several bites out of my vocabulary word. Thanks, pal! Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but hey, at least I can be the bearer of good word origins, huh? Come on! Incident comes from the Latin "in cīdere," which means to fall upon or to happen.

We can break that into two parts: "in," which means in or on, and "cīdere," which means to fall. So an incident is an event that fell upon you or happened. Now, normally this is the part of the video where I ask you to come up with some similar-sounding words, and we will get to that. But I wanted to head off some confusion: "cīdere" is different from "sīdere," which means to kill. It shows up in words like homicide or pesticide—right, to killing a person or killing pests, killing a bug—different words.

So, um, when we look for words that share a root with incident, they'll typically be pronounced "sī" instead of "cī." Anyway, let's do the thing! You've got 10 seconds to come up with words that use the prefix "in" or the root "cī." I'll put on some music. [Music]

Here are some words I came up with: "sedent," a chance happening, an unexpected mistake, coincidence—right? Which is when two or more things happen at once without having been planned—coincident, things happening together—and "inspect," which is to look at something carefully, looking in.

Let's use incident in a sentence because I think that'll get across its bad news connotation. Sadly, the incident in the library destroyed all the books. It was a bummer to lose all those books—an unfortunate thing happened.

Incident can also sometimes be a euphemism, a way of saying something ugly happened without having to name it. Note that I'm saying "the incident" and not "the fire" or "the horrific cotton candy machine malfunction." This would, as it happens, also be really bad for all the books.

Ah, uh, okay wordsmiths, I have to go. There's been an incident! I think the manatee's back and it's still hungry. Uh, I'll catch you all next time, huh? You can learn anything. David out!