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Hi Richard, I can see the confusion here, the words even sound nearly the same. I think that the most important difference is that "an accident" is something which happens purely by chance, there was no intention involved, and we can't really use "incident" like this. If you do something by accident, you don't mean to do it, perhaps it's something you do or did without thinking. Post-it notes are little sticky pieces of paper that we use to leave notes. And they were discovered by accident when a scientist, who was trying to make a very strong glue created a very weak one instead. He didn't mean to discover Post-it notes. He made them by accident. We often use "accident" to describe something unpleasant or unfortunate? She had an accident while she was skiing and broke her leg. It's especially common to use it when we are talking about traffic and vehicle collisions. The car accident caused a big problem on the motorway. |