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I've heard a lot of sentences like this:

"Do you know where is the church by any chance?"

Always using "By any chance" in the end of the sentence.

My question is: Can I use "By any chance" in the beginning of the sentence to start a conversation?

Something like this:

"Sorry, by any chance, do you know where I should check-in"?

Is it correct ? Or how strange does it sound?

J.R.
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FelipeKunzler
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  • I've heard people say it before and it does not sound odd to me at all. I'm not a native speaker though. – Vlammuh Jun 06 '15 at 22:08
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    You can find lots of examples by searching on Google books for "by any chance do" – J.R. Jun 06 '15 at 22:10
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    It sounds better at the end, because if you say it first, you're telling your listener that what you're about to ask isn't really that important or something for him to really worry about. If, by contrast, you say it at the end you give him the chance to be magnanimous and do you a great favor. –  Jun 07 '15 at 00:16
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    It sounds just fine, but "check-in" is not a verb; "check in" is. – Brian Hitchcock Jun 07 '15 at 10:07

3 Answers3

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Do you know where is the church, by any chance?

First off, this sentence sounds incorrect. It should be:

Do you know where the church is, by any chance?

You usually use the idiom "by any chance" at the end or in the middle of a sentence, but it's also grammatically correct, though not common, if you use it at the beginning of a sentence. For examples:

By any chance, do you know where the church is?

Sorry, by any chance, do you know where I should check in?

Khan
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0

It sounds perfectly acceptable to me and I've heard it before.

It can also be found in the British National Corpus. Here are two examples:

  • I tried a little name-dropping: ‘Do you, by any chance, know my friend Solly Zuckerman?’
  • Do you feel, by any chance, awful?

I haven't found an example like By any chance, do you know where I should check-in?, but it doesn't seem odd to me at all.

Vlammuh
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  • From Catcher in the Rye: "By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over?" (I don't know why this got downvoted, by the way; I thought it was a decent and helpful answer.) – J.R. Jun 07 '15 at 19:05
  • It could be that, or it could be that they thought you should have combed more through the corpus to find an example? I really don't know – I'm just venturing a guess. – J.R. Jun 07 '15 at 19:09
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I would like to add that people are using it now in terms of asking if someone has done something. Which is moronic unless what you're asking if they did something accidentally ...but one cannot "by chance, have moved" or "by chance, filed a police report" those are things that are done with intent which is a complete oxymoron and contradictory to what the term "by chance" means

Crystal
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