0 less important than the thing something is connected with or part of: --
1 happening by chance, or in connection with something of greater importance: --
Will I be reimbursed for incidental expenses at the conference?
His influence on younger employees was incidental, not intentional.
2 happening by chance, or in connection with something else that is more important: --
incidental to sth Whether one is 25 or 75, age is incidental to how well the job is done.
It is not incidental that the financial industry is one of the last remaining consumers of mainframe computers.
it is incidental that It is purely incidental that payroll savings were realized after the consolidation, because more employees chose to quit their jobs rather than follow them to the new headquarters.
3 incidental costs are amounts of money, usually small, that someone has to spend while trying to achieve something: --
4 something that is connected, often by chance, to something more important: --
5 small amounts of money spent while trying to achieve something: --
Nevertheless, in the rest of his article he criticised measures which were incidental to the goal of reviving private enterprise or could endanger it.
Little attention is paid, however, to separating the possibility of adaptive host manipulation from incidental (if fortuitous) side-effects of infection.
An incidental probe word was presented aurally 2,000 msec after onset of the delay interval.
There are only incidental examples of phenomena belonging to level 3 in those areas.
As with the lists of suppliers, the incidental details emerging from such microhistorical scrutiny bring as much enlightenment as the raw financial data.
The results showed no significant effects of textual elaboration on reading comprehension or incidental vocabulary learning.
The reason is that their ability to judge and revise ungrammaticalities appears incidental (performance is ad hoc) to task demands.
Moreover, the findings suggest that the notion of incidental vocabulary acquisition should be broadened.
