0 past simple and past participle of happen --
1 (of a situation or an event) to have existence or come into existence: --
What's happened to my pen? (= Where is it?) I put it down there a few moments ago.
What happened to your jacket? There's a big rip in the sleeve.
I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to him (= if he was hurt, became ill, or died).
I don't want to think about what might have happened if he'd been driving any faster.
No one knows exactly what happened but several people have been hurt.
2 to do or be by chance: --
As it happened (= although it was not planned), I had a few minutes to spare.
I happen to think he's right (= I do think so, although you do not).
She happens to like cleaning (= she likes cleaning, although that is surprising).
[ + that ] It just so happens that I have her phone number right here.
[ + (that) ] Fortunately it happened (that) there was no one in the house at the time of the explosion.
[ + to infinitive ] They happened to look (= looked by chance) in the right place almost immediately.
Eventually, the opponents had to capitulate in all three countries, but the manner in which this happened was not the same.
How frequently this happened and what degree of complexity resulted depended upon the composition of the offspring groups and the workings of mortality.
This might have happened repeatedly in the millennia that followed.
This had happened by the time of the appearance of two-word utterances, and priority was then given to noting down new utterances.
This also happened in the late 1970s when construction of the natural gas network was delegated to the state-owned oil and gas utility.
There seems to be no settled agreement about what happened, let alone why it matters.
This happened as a consequence of parasites adapting to hosts from different geographical regions and under variable environmental conditions.
It happened mainly in clarification exchanges (when users sometimes formulated their queries more than once).
