# Is There A Name For This Type Of Thing Sort Of A Coincidence
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-thing-sort-of-a-coincidence/513736
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [October 14, 2009, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-thing-sort-of-a-coincidence/513736 "2009-10-14T02:50:54Z")
**Posts on this page:** 8
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Markxxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Markxxx)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2009, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-thing-sort-of-a-coincidence/513736/1 "2009-10-14T02:50:54Z")
OK so today I was feeling low after a day of job hunting and I Googled my name to see if anything was there, trying to see if this was part of the problem. No, nothing came up.
Then I said, when I get a job, the thing I’d like to do is go back to my old neighborhood and see how it looks. I haven’t been there since 1981. Then I said “I guess everyone there will be dead by now.”
So then I put the name of the lady who was my mother’s best friend (she died in Dec of 1980) and my next-door-neighbor and what do you know, her name came up as an obituary. The woman died like two weeks ago.
I was a bit shocked, as the woman was 73 in 1980 so she lived to be over a hundred.
So my question is, is this a form of “coincidence”?
I find it odd that I never looked up her name before on Google and the first time I do it comes up as an obituary and she died so recently. (Her name is a bit unusual so it would come up as opposed to a Jane Smith, type tname.
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### Author:  [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2009, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-thing-sort-of-a-coincidence/513736/2 "2009-10-14T03:08:05Z")
Synchronicity, sorta.
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### Author:  [@LurkMeister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LurkMeister)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2009, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-thing-sort-of-a-coincidence/513736/3 "2009-10-14T03:14:39Z")
Not quite the same thing, but related: I attended college with someone who later became a moderately well-known actor. Not a big star, but he had a very respectable career (I don’t doubt that many people here would recognize the name if I mentioned it). One day it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard of him being in anything in a while, and looked him up online.
He had died just a few weeks before.
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### Author:  [@commasense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/commasense)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2009, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-thing-sort-of-a-coincidence/513736/4 "2009-10-14T04:17:43Z")
Merely a coincidence. They happen all the time.
If you had found out she died last year, it probably wouldn’t have been remarkable enough to inspire you to post about it. But if the obit had been in today’s paper, you might have freaked out: “What are the odds?!?”
Given a large enough dataset (like the billions of people in the real world), million-to-one coincidences happen all the time. And your example probably has much lower odds.
A couple of nights ago, as I was going to bed, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen any posts from **Q.E.D.** in a while. The next day I learned that [he had died](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=535212) just a couple of days ago.
Just a (very sad) coincidence.
(And, as it happens, he last posted about five months ago, so it’s not like I was being particularly observant.)
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### Author:  [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2009, 10:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-thing-sort-of-a-coincidence/513736/5 "2009-10-14T10:50:02Z")
Hmm. What part are you talking about? I mean, something that meant that opposite of serendipity would be useful here, but so would something about having “predicted” the results, purely by chance.
Mind, I can’t think of a word for either…
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### Author:  [@cerberus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cerberus)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2009, 12:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-thing-sort-of-a-coincidence/513736/6 "2009-10-14T12:36:07Z")
Morbid+Serendipity=Morbidipity
or
Mortality + Coincidence = Comordincidence
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### Author:  [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2009, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-thing-sort-of-a-coincidence/513736/7 "2009-10-14T13:33:12Z")
_Given a large enough dataset (like the billions of people in the real world), million-to-one coincidences happen all the time._
That’s a very good point. Assuming 5 billion adults in the world who could potentially note freaky coincidences, five thousand “million to one shots” get landed every day 🙂
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### Author:  [@Sateryn76](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sateryn76)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2009, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-name-for-this-type-of-thing-sort-of-a-coincidence/513736/8 "2009-10-14T14:53:46Z")
Happened to me last year. My aunt, who I had lost regular contact with after a divorce, had breast cancer, and I had heard it had come back. My dad told me I should check in at some point since she was starting to go downhill. So, as part of a random Facebook conversation on a Tuesday, I asked my cousin how she was…
“Oh no, I thought you knew…she died Monday” ☹