Pure luck, blind luck and dumb luck, are expressions used to refer to:
- complete luck; nothing but plain luck. I have no skill. I won by pure luck.
(McGraw-Hill Dictionary)
(Macmillandictionary.com)
- Curiously, as Ngram shows, the three expressions "pure luck, blind luck, dumb luck." have all been used from the same period, the middle of the 18th century.
1) The use of pure is quite intuitive and refers to something
- Complete; utter: pure folly. (AHD)
2) The use of blind refers to e the Roman goodness "Fortuna" (Lady Luck nowadays)
- Fortuna (Latin: Fortūna, equivalent to the Greek goddess Tyche) was the goddess of fortune and personification of luck in Roman religion. She might bring good luck or bad: she could be represented as veiled and blind, as in modern depictions of Justice, and came to represent life's capriciousness. (Wikipedia)
~ But what does 'dumb' refer to? How was it that this term came to be associated with luck?
Best Answer
Dumb luck is a chance event that has no meaning behind it. It's one that's completely random.
Dumb did not originally mean foolish and ignorant. It first meant having no voice, and thence meaningless and senseless, and that latter aspect of meaninglessness and senselessness is the very sense in which it was first applied to luck or chance.
The foolish sense came afterwards, and although it is now the dominant one, it does not apply here. Rather, dumb luck is a fossilized example of the more ancient sense: it is not an example of the present-day sense of foolish.
This more ancient sense of dumb is the one given by OED sense 7a meaning senseless, which it classifies as now rare. Note the reference to dumb chance — which is the same as dumb luck — found in the third citation.
The original meaning of dumb is the one that has no voice, carried by senses 1–6. Sense 7b is the later one meaning foolish and ignorant as applied to persons.