What are the differences about the words 'accident' and incident?
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, for example, are little sticky pieces of paper that we use to write notes on. 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."
'An incident' is much more general - we can use it to talk about almost anything that happens,
any single event. If we were describing a particular time when something went badly wrong, we
might talk about "the incident last summer" for example.
It might be something completely intentional - someone deliberately starting an argument ...
"We don't talk about politics at home since the incident last summer. Li was looking for an
argument and brought up the subject of the recent elections."
We couldn't call the argument 'an accident' because Li started it deliberately.
We often say 'incident' when we don't want to mention what actually happened, or sometimes if
we want to make an event sound less important. The police use 'incident' to talk about possible
crimes, if they're not yet sure if a crime has been committed. It's quite common to hear:
"Police are looking into the incident."
It means that they are investigating to see if someone has committed a crime.
So the biggest difference is that accidents are never intentional, but incidents might be
Accident and Incident:
两词区别
Accident and Incident:
两词区别
Yang Li: Hello and welcome to Question and Answer of the Week.
我是杨莉,大家好。
Kate: Hello, I'm Kate.
Yang
Li:
我们今天要回答的问题来自昆明的
Zoe.
我请菲菲来读一下她在电子邮件中提出的问题
“
看书时发
现
incident
与
accident
意思差不多,但究竟它们在用法上有什么区别呢,两个可以互换吗?
”
---Zoe,
KunmingYang
Li:
Zoe
wrote
that
she
found
the
words
accident
and
incident
similar
in
meaning and would like to know what the differences are. Can you help Kate?
Kate: Sure, I can help with that. Well, obviously there are lots of different uses for these words but I
want to focus on the basic meanings for each and their differences. I'll give lots of examples too of
course!
Yang Li: Good.
我们将集中介绍这两个词的基本用法和区别,附带很多例句。
Kate: Let’s start with
the word accident. It is used
to mean an unpleasant event
that happens