What is "ill-starred"

Usage examples of "ill-starred".

Phocion had wanted to fill in time until his new orders came, someone had informed her, by taking a hand in the training of the small group of raw enlistees who had arrived on the ill-starred transport ship along with Chen Shizuoka.

Perhaps, on one ill-starred day, Larry had exited the makeshift groggery after wetting his whistle excessively and turned left instead of right.

I have always been told I bore an ill-luck name, but Oeneus Asterius the Hierophant suggested to me that I did not know the truth of that tale, and you yourself bear an equally ill-starred name, for Pasiphae was mother to the Minotaur, do I not mistake my history.

The sailor, having made sure that Paulvitch had departed, returned to the forecastle, where he hid away his booty and turned into his bunk, while in the cabin that had belonged to the Russian there ticked on and on through the silences of the night the little mechanism in the small black box which held for the unconscious sleepers upon the ill-starred Kincaid the coming vengeance of the thwarted Russian.

Still, the captain knows her of old and speaks no ill of her, although some say she is a sorcerer and has used ill-starred magic to bind the regnant to her.

Indeed, it was to me almost a relief to turn from these deadly undertides to the ill-starred but spirited enterprises in the military sphere.

There was more to consider: for I was not averse to the possibility of gaining revenge upon the necrophile witch for my sakes, those of Lance Medlar and his ill-starred parents, of Kostos and of a woman whose name I shall never know, but whose methodically flayed and preserved body I shall always remember.

He remembered the bitter pride of the captive Hoofed Ones in Anshan, when he had ridden out with Tark and Lefty and Shan Kar on their ill-starred mission.

The ill-starred year in Florence - Demivolt having popped up again - now came back to him, each unpleasant detail quivering brightly in the dark room of his spy's memory.

Levrentü Alexandrovich Brudnoy was a trained fluid dynamicist who somehow managed to wangle a job as a life-support engineer at the ill-starred Russian facility called Lunagrad, and then go on to become its most famous—or infamous—emissary.

When Catherine Howard perished on the block, the duke, her uncle, who had brought about the ill-starred match, fell into disfavor with the vindictive monarch, and never regained the place he had hitherto held in Henry's regard.

Belbo agreed, and went so far as to curse the work of the sixth day, too, and perhaps also the rest on the seventh, because this was the most ill-starred Sunday he had ever lived through.

The history goes on to say, then, that when the bachelor Samson Carrasco recommended Don Quixote to resume his knight-errantry which he had laid aside, it was in consequence of having been previously in conclave with the curate and the barber on the means to be adopted to induce Don Quixote to stay at home in peace and quiet without worrying himself with his ill-starred adventures.