happen on

British

verb

(intr, preposition) to find by chance

I happened upon a five-pound note lying in the street

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Speaking to the BBC, resident Rosie Spence said she could not believe "something like this could happen on our doorstep".

From BBC

While I wasn’t entirely shocked when BP executives told me that they never thought a blowout like Macondo could happen on one of their projects, I was stunned when other industry execs insisted that it would not have happened on any of their projects.

From Slate

The two record finishes don’t need to happen on the same day, but they should occur close together, Acampora noted.

From MarketWatch

The future of self-driving cars hinges on reasoning, because it’s “impossible” to connect “every possible scenario” that could happen on the road.

From MarketWatch

The meeting of the TV tribes had to happen on neutral territory, and Macleod says he got the idea for the storyline from his own journeys back and forth between Manchester and Leeds.

From BBC

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023