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Allin

adversity

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ædˈvɜː.sɪ.ti//
  • Canada//ædˈvɝ.sɪ.ti//
  • Canada/[ædˈvɝ.sɪ.ɾi]/
  • Australia//ædˈvɜː.sɪ.ti//

The state of adverse conditions; state of misfortune or calamity.

noun

  1. 1

    The state of adverse conditions; state of misfortune or calamity.

    The doctor loved the squire, loved him as his oldest friend; but he loved him ten times better as being in adversity than he could ever have done had things gone well at Greshansbury in his time.

    God approves all adversity. Not all adversity that the Christian encounters is due to sins in the Christian's life. Not all adversity is the fault of the Christian.

    These are the people who will overcome the adversity, chaos, and destruction of combat and defeat the enemy in war.

  2. 2

    An event that is adverse; calamity.

    Having “secret notice,” the writer of “True Remembrances” declares of the above complains, he retired into Munster, intending to proceed to England, to justify himself; but was detained there for want of money by the breaking out of rebellion. This adversity befell him in the autumn of 1598.

    Every family is struck by adversity at one time or another. No matter how mature the patients are, regardless of the care an advantages they give their children, despite a desirable interactive love between family members, adversity will attack any family

    Make sure that your child’s adversity is really an adversity. Not having parents who can buy a new car upon your son’s sixteenth birthday is not an adversity. Being the only girl on the block who doesn’t own a designed handbag is not an adversity

Etymology

From Old French adversité, from Latin adversitātem, the accusative singular of adversitās, from adversus, the perfect passive participle of advertō (“to turn toward”).

Forms

plural
adversities
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).