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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
unfortunate
I.adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
an adverse/unfortunate consequence (=that affects your life, a situation etc badly)
▪ Divorce often has unfortunate consequences for children.
an unfortunate coincidence
▪ By a very unfortunate coincidence, she didn’t get either of his emails.
an unfortunate error
▪ An unfortunate error resulted in confidential information being released to the press.
an unfortunate incident (=involving an accident or argument)
▪ Disciplinary action may be taken over this unfortunate incident.
an unfortunate victim
▪ If you are the unfortunate victim of a tragic accident, this card will tell doctors that you are willing to donate your organs.
have the unfortunate habit of doing sth (=do something that makes other people feel embarrassed or offended)
▪ Teenage girls have the unfortunate habit of laughing too loudly.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
most
▪ The marriage feast was perhaps the most unfortunate that ever took place.
▪ Completely discredited, the curé said: a most unfortunate mistake.
▪ No reason why even the most unfortunate mortal should ever have a breath of depression.
▪ But Leonora's approaches had a most unfortunate effect.
▪ One most unfortunate consequence of the Counter-Reformation must be mentioned.
particularly
▪ Hiding from self and hiding from others interact in a particularly unfortunate way.
▪ The harsher conditions attaching to the receipt of unemployment benefit affect all claimants, but the consequences for women are particularly unfortunate.
▪ In these circumstances the absence of full legal rights to advocacy and representation is particularly unfortunate.
rather
▪ This leaves successful unassisted parties in a rather unfortunate position. 6.
▪ But Kant's choice of examples is rather unfortunate.
▪ We got her from Sidney Fawcett, but she had a rather unfortunate weakness.
▪ It was all rather unfortunate for City, whose impressive opening minutes promised much.
■ NOUN
accident
▪ Since the unfortunate accident to your father, I have had the strangest presentiments concerning you, at times.
▪ Last Friday's unfortunate accident left the club with no alternative.
▪ Although thousands of children are killed or injured each year in unfortunate accidents, something made this case special.
▪ It was a very unfortunate accident.
consequence
▪ One most unfortunate consequence of the Counter-Reformation must be mentioned.
▪ To choose one point of view over the other can lead to unfortunate consequences for both the humanists and politicians.
▪ This tendency has the unfortunate consequence of making program administrators less open to evaluation and more suspicious of its value.
▪ This has the unfortunate consequence that they are much more likely to kill their patients than to cure them.
▪ The unfortunate consequence of this aggressive approach has been the development of hypoparathyroidism in more than 10 percent of patients undergoing surgery.
▪ This could have had unfortunate consequences, so we started up the motor and went on towards the beach.
▪ People will be reluctant to hold them, and that would have unfortunate consequences in the form of higher interest rates.
experience
▪ I had another upset after the unfortunate experience with Chip and Tip.
▪ He may have had an unfortunate experience with a highway engineer - Mr. Hughes Several.
▪ Particularly after her unfortunate experience with Ben Braithwaite.
▪ The Palace Girls had an unfortunate experience trying to reach Paris.
▪ This is, of course, just the sort of unfortunate experience which can scar a young girl for life.
fact
▪ In addition, it is an unfortunate fact that some gay men are paedophiles, however few in comparison with heterosexual men.
▪ It is an unfortunate fact that Klein has almost no sociological theory, and that Marcuse has no therapeutic theory.
▪ For the sexually active, this is an unfortunate fact of life.
habit
▪ For Rubberneck had the unfortunate habit of hanging around outside school play-yards.
▪ Alas, even the most well-meaning opera buffs have an unfortunate habit of making their favorite indoor sport sound impossibly complicated.
▪ Redundancy is more than an unfortunate habit, however, and results from four factors: 1.
incident
▪ This led to an unfortunate incident at Leamington Station in 1874.
▪ This has been a very unfortunate incident, unfortunate that it even occurred.
▪ As far as I can recall there were no unfortunate incidents involving animals in Baldersdale.
▪ Store owners kept each other abreast of these unfortunate incidents and warned each other.
▪ I watched the fish for several weeks before the unfortunate incident of the Great Grand Union Drought disaster.
man
▪ We heard of a case in which an unfortunate man accidentally swallowed one.
▪ The unfortunate man had been killed before he had an opportunity to enjoy his bountiful store...
▪ Hamilton was one of those unfortunate men who have inherited immense wealth but not a lot more.
▪ The unfortunate man was Mr John Stevenson, a young lawyer from London.
▪ The unfortunate man had suffered such violent panic attacks that he tried to throw himself out of the window.
▪ This unfortunate man exemplifies many of the problems of mentally disordered offenders.
▪ Eventually, exhaustion forced the unfortunate man to abandon the chase.
people
▪ Today, many unfortunate people have too much enforced leisure, when they would actually prefer to be occupied.
▪ For I helped to heap further suffering on those unfortunate people.
▪ She was one of those unfortunate people who seem to invite disaster wherever they go.
result
▪ The unfortunate result - a general bitterness towards nations of a stronger foundation.
▪ This may have been the unfortunate result of damage from the dismantling of H-4 during the disclosure proceedings.
▪ He added that the delay was the unfortunate result of three emergency calls arriving within an hour.
▪ This has had an unfortunate result.
▪ The unfortunate result can be a Change of the Month routine.
▪ That is simply part of the unfortunate result of some of their individual restraints.
▪ The White House initiative did perhaps have one real and unfortunate result.
thing
▪ Of all the unfortunate things to happen.
▪ The unfortunate thing is that a good part of it came from an unexpected direction.
▪ Just one of those unfortunate things.
victim
▪ The unfortunate victim was wheeled directly into the major treatment area, where he was examined by the duty medical officer.
▪ This is a genuine surgical emergency if it occurs and the unfortunate victim has to be whisked off to hospital.
▪ This theory also has the last unfortunate victim as a man called Coln, hence the name Colnbrook.
woman
▪ One unfortunate woman who ran a discount shoe store was oblivious to the fact she was sitting on an old school goldmine.
▪ He would have dragged the unfortunate woman back here with him.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
lucky/unfortunate etc enough to be/do sth
▪ Alan was lucky enough to discover a scorpion in the fruit bowl.
▪ And handsome David Wood, who now runs his own hairdressing salon in Melbourne, was lucky enough to date her.
▪ And I was lucky enough to sit in the catbird seat and watch and learn and be changed myself.
▪ And when I was lucky enough to enjoy some rare hot weather my feet stayed as cool as I could have expected.
▪ I thought I had been lucky enough to pick up a shore current that was helping me along toward the rip.
▪ If you are lucky enough to see one, observe it from a distance.
▪ Regardless of their preferences, not every couple is lucky enough to find two equal jobs in the same community.
▪ Some authors are lucky enough to think naturally in terms of story.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ "It was an unfortunate set of circumstances that no one could have predicted," a spokesperson said today.
▪ an unfortunate accident
▪ an unfortunate marriage
▪ He has an unfortunate habit of repeating himself.
▪ He was unfortunate enough to lose his job just after his wife had a baby.
▪ It was very unfortunate that someone ended up getting hurt.
▪ Parents are so busy with their careers that they don't have time to have fun with their children, and that's unfortunate.
▪ Quarterback Brady Anderson was injured in an unfortunate collision with one of his team-mates.
▪ Some of the unfortunate victims were trapped inside the building for over 12 hours.
▪ The mix-up was the result of a set of unfortunate circumstances.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Alas, even the most well-meaning opera buffs have an unfortunate habit of making their favorite indoor sport sound impossibly complicated.
▪ But his tendency to depreciate the validity of gratitude is unfortunate.
▪ He added that the delay was the unfortunate result of three emergency calls arriving within an hour.
▪ I think these hundreds of unfortunate beings have some rights which we should consider.
▪ It's unfortunate it had to happen.
▪ Setting specific financial goals before you begin your new business is a way to avoid this unfortunate situation.
II.noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a poor unfortunate
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Frankie had been one of those unfortunates.
▪ Of course, there are no longer bawdy houses, where these unfortunates are displayed openly to debauched satyrs.
▪ The ferryman was Charon and those he would not admit to his boat were the unfortunates who had not been duly buried.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Unfortunate

Unfortunate \Un*for"tu*nate\, a. Not fortunate; unsuccessful; not prosperous; unlucky; attended with misfortune; unhappy; as, an unfortunate adventure; an unfortunate man; an unfortunate commander; unfortunate business. -- n. An unfortunate person.
--Hood. [1913 Webster] -- Un*for"tu*nate*ly, adv. -- Un*for"tu*nate*ness, n.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
unfortunate

mid-15c., "unlucky," from un- (1) "not" + fortunate (adj.). Infortunate in same sense is from late 14c. (along with a verb infortune "to render unhappy"). In late 18c.-early 19c., unfortunate woman was a polite way to say "prostitute." The noun meaning "one who is not fortunate" is recorded from 1630s.

Wiktionary
unfortunate

a. 1 not favored by fortune 2 marked or accompanied by or resulting in misfortune n. An unlucky person.

WordNet
unfortunate
  1. adj. not favored by fortune; marked or accompanied by or resulting in ill fortune; "an unfortunate turn of events"; "an unfortunate decision"; "unfortunate investments"; "an unfortunate night for all concerned" [ant: fortunate]

  2. not auspicious; boding ill [syn: inauspicious] [ant: auspicious]

  3. unsuitable or regrettable; "an unfortunate choice of words"; "an unfortunate speech"

unfortunate

n. a person who suffers misfortune [syn: unfortunate person]

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.