fluky
The discovery was a fluke.
I don't think it's a fluke that the numbers add up the way that they do.
I went there almost by fluke.
The fact that I beat him was no fluke.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Chance and randomness
accident
accident of birth
aleatory
arbitrarily
arbitrariness
coincidence
crapshoot
even money
fluky
fortuitous
luck
luck into something
more by accident than designidiom
more by luck than judgmentidiom
non-purposive
randomness
serendipitous
serendipitously
sortition
stumble into something

flukenoun (OF WHALE)

[ C ]
one of the two parts that a whale's tail is divided into:
Individual humpback whales can be identified by their tail flukes.
The whales gracefully arced out of the water before disappearing again with a flick of their flukes.
I have seen whales swimming in a circle around a school of herrings, forcing them together in a whirlpool created by their flukes.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Miscellaneous animal body parts
back end
blowhole
bobtail
caudate
claw
dorsal fin
dorsally
gill
hindquarters
nipple
pincer
pouch
pseudopod
reticulum
scut
speculum
sting
stinger
teat
udder

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Marine mammals

flukenoun (WORM)

[ C or U ]
a small flatworm(= a creature with a flat body) that lives as a parasite inside or on the body of another animal, and can cause disease:
liver flukeParasites such as liver flukes can quickly make a sheep lose condition.
The cause of the disease is a blood fluke.
The crab hosts a parasitic lung fluke that can infect mammals including humans.
Inspect your fish carefully to see if there are any external parasites, such as flukes.
The ant's brain has been invaded by a fluke.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Worms, snails, slugs & similar animals
annelid
centipede
earthworm
echinococcus
escargot
gastropod
hookworm
leech
limacine
millepede
minibeast
nematode
pill bug
roly-poly
roundworm
slug
snail
woodlouse
worm

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Zoology: veterinary medicine

fluke | American Dictionary

fluke
noun[ Cusually sing ]
us/fluk /
something, usually a good thing, that has happened as result of chance instead of skill or planning:
He’s trying to prove that his last victory wasn’t a fluke.

Examples of fluke

fluke
Maximum values obtained from measurements vary in liver flukes from the three host species (table 2).
Human infections with the lung fluke are acquired by eating raw or undercooked freshwater crabs containing live metacercariae.
This temperature has also been used for storing metacercariae by other authors, thus enabling comparative analysis with lowland liver fluke isolates.
We then focus on flukes and snails, highlighting important biological traits with regard to population structure.
Naturally infected flukes were identical with those recovered from experimentally infected fish.
In the second group of six rabbits each given 200 metacercariae, five were infected, with two or three flukes per host.
When metacercariae harvested from the snakes and intercostal muscles of rodents were infected orally to cats, they developed into adult flukes in the small intestine.
Muscle fibres enzymatically isolated from the fluke have been characterised in terms of their morphology and contractile proteins.
Isolated muscle fibres from the ventral sucker may represent a more homogeneous population of muscle fibres than fibres isolated from a whole fluke digest.
The main cause of anaemia in fascioliasis is the passage of red blood cells into the gastrointestinal tract, presumably via flukes and the bile duct.
Following entry into the liver, the fluke burrows through the liver parenchyma before reaching its final site in the bile duct.
In contrast, follicles were present in flukes at the earliest time of recovery from the bile duct, namely, 5 weeks 3 days post-infection.
Partially digested ventral suckers of adult flukes were prepared as described previously, then fixed and processed for phalloidin staining.
These spines may facilitate the movement of juvenile flukes during their migration to the biliary system of the liver.
Transverse and longitudinal thick tissue sections of adult flukes (more than 12 weeks old) were fixed and processed for phalloidin staining as described above.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.