Would you please tell me if the following sentence is correct?
I will come and meet you at the first chance.
I'm confused about that last part. I've seen the idiom "at the first chance" before, but I'm not sure if I've used it properly in the sentence. If this isn't correct, please explain why.
As for context, I would be sending this to a professor in an email.
Best Answer
At the first chance is occasionally found in contexts like this, but as J.R. suggests it is rare, and it feels alien to my ear. The Google Ngram below appears to corroborate this; as you see, chance occurs in print only about 5% as often as opportunity—and some of those occurrences are "false hits", things like He leapt at the first chance.
Note, however, that chance is considerably more frequent when it takes a complement such as at the first chance to meet you or a modifier such as at the first chance he got.
Nonetheless, I would avoid chance in these contexts and write opportunity instead: