Contingent

Research

Dependent on circumstances; conditional rather than inevitable. A historically contingent outcome could have been otherwise.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — contingent merriam-webster.com accessed 23 September 2026

Merriam-Webster: “dependent on or conditioned by something else”, and “likely but not certain to happen: possible”. From Latin contingere, “to be in contact with, arrive at, affect, fall to one’s lot, come about, happen”; the adjective is first recorded in the fifteenth century. Both senses are live in research writing and they are not the same claim — that a finding is contingent on context says it depends on something, while contingency in the second sense says it merely might occur.

Merriam-Webster is cited as the dictionary of record: where an entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it. The research usage above is this lexicon’s own.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).