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What is "unlooked-for"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
unlooked-for
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ He had seen this unlooked-for inheritance simply as a source of lucre.
▪ He wondered afterwards whether his unlooked-for success in the examination caused him to read the wrong subject at the university.
▪ In his family he found an unlooked-for happiness.
▪ The readers were simply an unlooked-for hazard.
▪ Theodora gazed at the extraordinary, the unlooked-for information.
▪ This recondite reinterpretation of the classics had the unlooked-for result of keeping them alive and well for many, many centuries.
▪ This was such an unlooked-for success that I now only need glasses for reading.
▪ Whatever it was, the Regent saw it as an unlooked-for opportunity.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Unlooked-for

Unlooked-for \Un*looked"-for\, a. Not looked for; unexpected; as, an unlooked-for event.

Wiktionary
unlooked-for

a. Not expected or anticipated; unforeseen

WordNet
unlooked-for

adj. not anticipated; "unanticipated and disconcerting lines of development"- H.W.Glidden; "unforeseen circumstances"; "a virtue unlooked-for in people so full of energy"; "like a bolt out of the blue" [syn: unanticipated, unforeseen, out of the blue(p)]

Usage examples of "unlooked-for".

A crucial midcourse correction, equally unlooked-for, was supplied by Piers Bursill-Hall after he sat through an infamously long lecture delivered by yours truly in Cambridge in 2002.

With such sounds he now breaks silence, soon, however, controlling himself to say that he does not comprehend why a gentleman so faithful and zealous as the late Mr. Tulkinghorn should have communicated to him nothing of this painful, this distressing, this unlooked-for, this overwhelming, this incredible intelligence.

The advent of the two-piece suit, with its inevitable concomitant of a few exposed navels, was an unlooked-for source of delicious indignation to her.

An occasional sale of a picture helped to fill the larder or the fuel tank when bonuses were scarce, and the odd gift of an unlooked-for screen-canvas did much to placate occasionally fratchety bureaucrats.

A grave peril I saw coming unlooked-for upon Gondor from the South that will draw off great strength from the defence of Minas Tirith.

She was partly lured by an unlooked-for understander of her plight, but equally was stung by his understanding.