"Leaving home was a major event in his life." Can I use "incident" instead of "event" in that sentence?
Are they synonyms or not?
Learn English – the difference between “event” and “incident”
differencemeaningsynonymsword-choiceword-difference
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Best Answer
An event is usually a planned thing. Leaving home, a birth, a wedding, a party, those are generally considered events.
An incident is usually unplanned. It is something that happens unexpectedly, and often there is a negative connotation. For example, at a help desk, people register incidents, meaning that something happened (a bug, a problem, a system failure) that was not only unplanned, but also unwanted.
If you say that leaving home was an incident, you give the impression it happened by accident, and probably because something bad happened.