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Allin

occurrence

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//əˈkʌɹ.əns//
  • United Kingdom//əˈkɜː.ɹəns//
  • United States//əˈkɜɹ.əns//
  • New Zealand//əˈkɐɹ.əns//
  • New Zealand//əˈkøː.ɹəns//

An actual instance when a situation occurs; an event or happening.

noun

  1. 1

    An actual instance when a situation occurs; an event or happening.

    Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of foul white smoke that, carried by the wind, can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles.

  2. 2

    The lexical aspect (aktionsart) of verbs or predicates that change in or over time.

    The time interval of an occurrence—a temporal instantiation—is a single occasion. However, a series of such occasions can fall within a certain time interval; in this case we may represent the occurrence as a single situation (cf. I ran off and on for an hour, I ran and ran for an hour, I would run and then run some more).

    The most basic Aktionsart distinction is between states and occurrences. […]Based on consideration of inherent differences between the events involved, Vendler distinguished three different types of occurrence, achievements, activities, and accomplishments.

Etymology

From Middle French occurrence, from Medieval Latin occurrentia. Morphologically occur + -ence.

Forms

plural
occurrences
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).