- unlucky
- unlucky, disastrous, ill-starred, ill-fated, unfortunate, calamitous, luckless, hapless can all mean having, meeting, or promising an outcome that is distinctly unfavorable (as to hopes, plans, or well-being).Unlucky implies that in spite of efforts or merits one meets with bad luck, often chronically, or that a specific occasion or action will be or has proved to be unfavorable especially in its outcome or consequences{
the child who is born on an unlucky day— Kardiner
}{the loss of over $200,000 in an unlucky coffee speculation— H. G. Pearson
}{it was the unluckiest step we ever made to admit him into the bosom of our family— Lytton
}Disastrous and ill-starred both carry the astrological implication that the stars are adverse to the person or thing in question and both suggest a more or less dire fate for him or it{the intrepid but ill-starred General . . . met with an airplane accident . . . and was burned to death— Peers
}Though disastrous and ill- starred often imply a calamitous result as inevitable{in his fury made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the fortunes of the Third Reich— Shirer
}{the period and the region that produced Burr's ill-starred conspiracy— H. E. Davis
}disastrous is not infrequently used in a much weakened sense without a hint of inevitability or, often, an implication of consequences more serious than that of a turning of the tables upon one or the other of the participants or contenders{a . . . denial of poetic possibilities ... is liable to disastrous refutation by a triumphant instance of the "poetizing" ... of that very word— Lowes
}Ill-starred, on the other hand, is close to ill-fated in meaning in that both imply an evil and unavoidable destiny awaiting a person or an action{the holiday was ill-starred from the outset, and a series of minor catastrophes culminated in a blowout on a lonely road— Cerf
}{the ill-fated attempt to collect the old war debts— Soule
}{served as a wagoner with General Braddock's ill-fated army—J. M. Brown
}Unfortunate, though often interchangeable with unlucky, carries a much weaker implication of the intervention of chance{had an unfortunate day at the races
}and a much stronger suggestion of misfortune, misery, unhappiness, or desolation, often to the extent of eliminating all suggestions of luck or of chance; occasionally it means nothing much more than regrettable or disastrous in its weakened sense{a most unfortunate family
}{an unfortunate choice of words
}{expecting some unfortunate woman to instruct simultaneously a crowd of fifty urchins of all degrees of ignorance— Grandgent
}Calamitous, which is used of events rather than persons, resembles unfortunate in its frequent elimination of all suggestion of luck or chance and in sometimes meaning little more than regrettable or upsetting{mother was afraid to leave the house in case something calamitous would happen, so we had a little extra time for dressing— Molly Weir
}but it, like the noun calamity (which see under DISASTER) often suggests dire misery or the utmost of woeful distress typically stemming from some grave and extraordinary event{in that calamitous year of 1932 a total of 277,952 foreclosures forced people out of their homes— O'Brien
}{men naturally admire Hannibal though the success of his cause might have been calamitous to the progress of civilization— Cohen
}{there was more news than ever before, practically all of it calamitous— Catton
}Luckless and hapless are more or less rhetorical terms implying that the person or thing so described has or reveals less than average good luck or good fortune (as in his undertakings or in their outcome); usually these words mean nothing more than unhappy, miserable, or wretched{she had disobeyed— and at the wrong time. Ah, the horrible, chancy, luckless wrong time— Styron
}{hapless beings caught in the grip of forces we can do little about— Whyte
}{the other victims . . . met an even more hapless fate— E. S. Bates
}Antonyms: lucky
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
