A person who suffers misfortune

Usage examples of unfortunate.

Belisarius betrayed the impotence of the conqueror, and accomplished the ruin of those unfortunate countries.

The gallant and unfortunate earl of Surrey might probably have escaped his unmerited fate, had not his demand of the combat against his accuser been overruled.

It will be seen at once how such a congenital antipathy would tend to isolate the person who was its unfortunate victim.

The Anglophone tradition in this century, which in almost every other respect has made a powerful and prolific contribution to revolutionary historiography, has a particularly egregious record of silent embarrassment, rather as though a dinner guest had met with an unfortunate but inexplicable accident in the college common room.

I know no justification, at any distance of time, for calumniating an historical character: surely truth belongs to the dead, and to the unfortunate: and they who have died upon a scaffold have generally had faults enough of their own, without attributing to them that which the very incurring of the perils which conducted them to their violent death renders, of all others, the most improbable.

But if the insanity were temporary, or if Ballenger could recover sufficiently to conceal it from the judge, then Watson himself might be in an unfortunate and vulnerable legal position: a suit for false arrest, or worse.

Anyway, copious quantities of hydrogen gas were pouring from the shaft maw, coming from the rent where the unfortunate brown man had fallen into a ballonet and suffocated.

At its head, two officers of the police proudly bore long, flat bamboo sticks for inflicting the bastinado to any unfortunate who incurred their wrath.

But however, in the treatment of his unfortunate rivals, Aurelian might indulge his pride, he behaved towards them with a generous clemency, which was seldom exercised by the ancient conquerors.

I shall pass some hours of the morning with Musikmeister Hummel, pursuing my secret plan, the unfortunate venue of which appears to be the summer-house.

Without the magnetosphere anyone unfortunate enough to step into sunlight would pretty quickly take on the appearance of, let us say, an overcooked pizza.

Then he realized the explanation had to have been the unfortunate fact that all four had resulted in malpractice litigation.

Firmly believing that the late United States Minister to the unfortunate island had at least acquiesced in the overthrow of the Hawaiian Government, President Cleveland, with the hope that he might measurably repair the wrong, recalled the Annexation Treaty, as stated.

Fordyce intends to astonish us all by having Drake avoid the usual unfortunate demise meted out to villains.

That unfortunate misconception is the legacy of a smear campaign launched by the early Church.