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Allin

unlucky

adjectivecommon in dialogue

  • //ʌnˈlʌki//

Unfortunate, marked by misfortune.

adjective

  1. 1

    Unfortunate, marked by misfortune.

    I pray you in your Letters, / When you ſhall theſe vnluckie deeds relate, / Speake of me, as I am. […] / Of one, whoſe ſubdu'd Eyes, / Albeit un-vsed to the melting moode, / Drops teares as faſt as the Arabian Trees / Their Medicinable gumme.

    "So he has a chance," said Connie. "Buckley's chance, the way his luck is. Fell out with his girl he did, and lost his job, and now 'e's goin' to lose 'is life. The unluckiest man that ever lived."

    Her unluckier daughter and great-granddaughter have been tarred by amour's sloppy brush; but Mrs. Keppel, as her biographer Diana Souhami has written, "turned adultery into an art."

    For those unlucky enough to be on a service without lavatory provision, we can only speculate as to how passengers improvised if caught short. For men, it might be possible to urinate, albeit at the risk of offending fellow passengers - there were reports of passengers being hauled up before the courts for 'micturition' in coaches during the 19th century.

  2. 2

    Inauspicious.

  3. 3

    Having ill luck.

  4. 4

    Bringing ill luck.

    Country like Nepal, India, Bhutan and Myanmar, people who follows Hindu religion, they consider the numbers 0, 1, 8, 10, 12, 19 and 28 as unlucky numbers, bad luck or evil spirits etc. These numbers are called oudenophobia, henophobia, octophobia, decaphobia, dodecaphobia, enneadecaphobia and eikosioctophobia respectively.

  5. 5

    obsoleteMischievous.

    “The brat continued yelpin' an' yowlin', an' aitin' more nor his three brothers put together, an' playin' all sorts uv unlucky thricks, for he was mighty mischievyously inclined, till it happened one day that Tim Carrol, the blind piper, goin' his rounds, called in and sot down by the fire to hav' a bit o' chat wid the woman o' the house.”

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *né Proto-Indo-European *n̥- Proto-Germanic *un- Proto-West Germanic *un- Old English un- Middle English un- English un- English lucky English unlucky From un- + lucky.

Forms

comparative
unluckier, more unlucky
superlative
unluckiest, most unlucky
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).