"Misadventure" redirects here. For other uses, see Misadventure (disambiguation).
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A railing accident at a college football game, spilling fans onto the sidelines

An accident or a mishap is an accident and unplanned event or circumstance, often with lack of intention or necessity. It usually implies a generally negative outcome which might have been avoided or prevented had circumstances leading up to the accident been recognized, and acted upon, prior to its occurrence. Injury prevention refers to activities designed to foresee and avoid accidents.

Accidents of particularly common types (crashing of automobiles, events causing fire, etc.) are investigated to identify how to avoid them in the future. This is sometimes called root cause analysis, but does not generally apply to accidents that cannot be deterministically predicted. A root cause of an uncommon and purely random accident may never be identified, and thus future similar accidents remain "accidental."

Contents

    1 Types
        1.1 Physical and non-physical
        1.2 By activity
        1.3 By vehicle
    2 Most common causes
    3 See also
        3.1 General
        3.2 Transportation
        3.3 Other specific topics
    4 References
    5 External links