Home › Glossary › Letter C

Contingency

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Contingency describes events or truths that could have been otherwise—they are not necessary but depend on specific conditions or chance.

Detailed Definition
Poetry engages contingency to express fragility, unpredictability, or the arbitrariness of existence. It appears in verses that dwell on missed encounters, historical accidents, or the precariousness of love and life, resisting grand narratives of fate or divine order.
Example
Example in poetry:
W.H. Auden’s "Musée des Beaux Arts" notes how Icarus’s fall happens while others "eat or open a window"—highlighting life’s contingency; Tracy K. Smith’s "The United States Welcomes You" shows how immigration status hinges on arbitrary bureaucratic chance; Billy Collins’s "Litany" playfully suggests love depends on unpredictable metaphors; Robert Frost’s "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" hinges on the speaker’s contingent choice to keep promises; Seamus Heaney’s "Digging" reflects on how vocation might have been otherwise—rooted in historical and familial chance.
Additional Notes
Contingency emphasizes that reality could have been otherwise—history, identity, or love hinge on chance; this challenges teleological or deterministic worldviews; in poetry, it appears in “what if” scenarios (Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”), historical counterfactuals, or poems about near-misses; useful for interpreting works that highlight fragility, luck, or the arbitrariness of social categories like race or gender.
Also Known As
Contingent Truth Accidental Being
Skip to main content