accidentally

adverb

ac·​ci·​dent·​al·​ly ˌak-sə-ˈdent-lē  -ˈden-tᵊl-ē 

: in an accidental or unintended manner : by accident

I accidentally deleted the file.

The lock prevents the gate from opening accidentally.

Six lionfish were accidentally released from a home aquarium in Biscayne Bay, Fla., during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

—Alcestis Cooky Oberg

The Olympic test was thrown out after the test lab accidentally destroyed the backup sample … that's required to confirm a positive result.

—Christie Aschwanden

He bumped into her accidentally on purpose. [=he bumped into her intentionally but he tried to make it appear to be an accident]

Examples of accidentally in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Maybe Meta made subtle changes in its training recipe that accidentally worsened the memorization problem. —ArsTechnica, 20 June 2025

By feeding alligators, either accidentally or intentionally, the animals may begin to relate humans to food. —Sam Gillette, People.com, 19 June 2025

If the humor clicks with you, there’s joy to be had in accidentally setting yourself on fire over and over again while being chased by a Slenderman-like apparition made of Post-Its. —Christopher Cruz, Rolling Stone, 19 June 2025

However, the company said this issue was largely mitigated after a dataset that was accidentally omitted during training was restored. —Beatrice Nolan, Fortune, 19 June 2025

Word History

First Known Use

14th century, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for accidentally

• detrimentally
• fundamentally
• governmentally
• incidentally
• incrementally
• instrumentally
• sentimentally
• temperamentally
• coincidentally
• environmentally
• experimentally
• mentally