It would be a grave mistake to misuse our four years in college under the impression that our lives will come together upon finding our future husbands.
Invention, by contrast, is the act of "coming upon or finding: discovery".
The OED's first definition of invention is dated 1509: "the action of coming upon or finding; discovery".
The OED's first definition of invention is dated 1509: "the action of coming upon or finding; discovery". The word has had more or less the same meaning ever since, and has also retained its charm.
Once she remembers coming home and, upon finding that no one was coming to answer the door, fantasising that her parents might be dead.
Physiological scientist Arthur Arnold and colleagues were probing the genetic basis of brain differences between songbird genders when they came upon a puzzling finding: Z-linked genes seemed to be expressed at much higher levels in males than in females.
In this study, guided by analyses of tumor microarray databases, we came upon the surprising finding that, while INT6 mRNA levels are as expected lower in breast cancer than in normal tissue, INT6 mRNA levels are also very low in the tumor stroma.
Coming upon them and finding words for them in English has been one of the most rewarding aspects of our work.
But I wasn't into reading introductions and so came upon all of it without context, finding the stories even stranger and funnier than those I'd already read, some with really curious characters and writing techniques I'd never known before.
The pick of the bunch came from Oleksandr Devlysh who, upon finding himself with his back to goal and the ball at his feet, deftly backheeled past defender and goalkeeper into the goal.
But policemen came upon them and were immediately suspicious about finding Jewish men in a Palestinian neighborhood at that hour.
