While trying to find the word I was looking for that means
a fortuitous coming together of events (which I was unsuccessful at, and darn it, it's on the tip of my tongue),
I came across the following at Thesaurus.com, which seems to use mostly Roget's:
"[Nouns] chance, indetermination, accident, fortune, hazard, hap, haphazard, chance medley, random, luck, raccroc, casualty, contingence, adventure, hit; fate (necessity) [more]; equal chance; lottery; tombola; toss up [more]; turn of the table, turn of the cards; hazard of the die, chapter of accidents, fickle finger of fate; cast of the dice, throw of the dice; heads or tails, flip of a coin, wheel of Fortune; sortes, sortes Virgilianae."
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Has anyone heard of the word raccroc before? I don't think I'd heard tombola, either.
A tombola is a kind of prize draw. You buy the chance to pull a ticket out of a bag or rotating drum and your prize is written on the ticket. Do you have fetes (charity does in aid of some local cause where people offer home cooking for sale and there are sack races and other such goings on)in Kentucky?
Bingley
You explication of "tombola" is quite new to me.I would call your game a "pesca" (= fishing).
Tombola is the same - I believe - that your bingo - 90 numbers ...
We play it usually in the houses during Christmastide. There are things to say , related to every number ...
for example
47 = morto che parla = dead man talking.
This fact of numbers and words is also related to the game of "lotto" - you have to guess 2,or 3, or4, or 5 numbers from 1 to 90, and you can win a lot of money . Also, people is trying to associate numbers to dreams, for example
90 = la paura (fear). Naples is the realm of this kind of things.
Ciao
Emanuela
You're not by chance thinking merely of serendipity, are you, Jackie?
In the UK, bingo and a tombola are definitely two very different things. In bingo, numbers are called out and you mark them on your card until you get a line. With a tombola, you draw out a raffle ticket and then get given the prize that is marked with the corresponding number. As a result, prizes are usually low value, or whatever the organising committee could get people to donate.
Yes, I would agree with that, fkay, - yet I remember my brother talking about "tombola" being played when he was in the British Navy, and the game he described was most definitely what we call "bingo." I have also heard bingo called "lotto" as well - most confusing!
Mind you, in certain places, especially southern England, the term "Tombola" was used to mean what I wold call a "raffle" - where you buy a ticket and if your number is drawn you win a prize.
Curioser and curioser!
Serendipity was it, thank you, Bridget96. I see I'm not the only one who "loses" words.
Yes, Bingley, we have games of chawnce heah in Kentucky!
Now--I did say I love the unpredictable paths this board takes, but. So far the only comments have been on my
"side" item! No one has commented on the "entrée".
Tsuwm, where are you?
I vaguely remember that the French expression "par raccroc" means precisely "by chance". Perhaps this word has been in the English vocabulary since Norman times, perhaps it is of relatively new adoption. In any case, a common everyday word it is not.
As to "tombola", in Spain we have a much older version of Forrest Gump's "Life is like a box of chocolates" in our wise saying "La vida es una tómbola"... In raffles, as in chocolate boxes, you never know what you are going to get.
Marianna
[on-the-way-to-becoming-something-or-other-with-one-of-these-posts-emoticon]
Darn! Still a stranger? 
When we lived in Italy (Sardinia, actually) we had a game called Tombola, which is pretty much as Emanuela described it, but without the word parts to go with the numbers (a bit too deep for an eight-year-old!). I didn't know it had an English meaning at all!
Darn! Still a stranger? Stick around, kiddo - you'll be stranger still!
Serendipity! The three princes of Serendip would have had trouble creating a word had they lived in Ceylon (Ceylondipity?) or (Sri Lanka - Sri Lankiness?)
Raccroc sounds like a cross between a raccoon and a crocodile. There used to be a game of naming crosses of different birds. The cross between a pheasant and a duck was the end.
I found raccroc marked [F] in one online thesaurus and [obs] in yet another; i finally traced the phrase
par raccroc down in a French dictionary, by chance.
'raccroc', in french, has dual (and seemingly unrelated) meanings: (1) a rip or tear and (2) a sudden sharp turn.
Serendipity! The three princes of Serendip would have had trouble creating a word had they lived in Ceylon (Ceylondipity?) or (Sri Lanka - Sri Lankiness?)
Ceylonity doesn't sound that strange really. If it had been the original word we wouldn't think it was abnormal.
Pronounced to rhime with day crock,
raccroc was the founder of McDonalds.
In reply to:
Pronounced to rhime with day crock,
raccroc was the founder of McDonalds.
Cheesy pun. Fries my mind. Shakes me up.
-- Oh Happy Me(al)