noun
-
evil fortune; bad luck
-
an unfortunate or disastrous event; calamity
Synonym Usage
See affliction.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of misfortune
Explanation
On a gloomy day, you may feel compelled to list your misfortunes: a broken umbrella, a broken heart, a broken toe. Misfortune means bad luck or the state of having bad luck. Break misfortune into its parts and you get mis- meaning bad and fortune meaning chance or luck. Sometimes it can feel like misfortune follows you. Picture it as a gloomy psychic named "Miss Fortune" who can only see the bad things in your future.
Vocabulary lists containing misfortune
Power Prefix: mis-
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"The Experiment" and "Superstition"
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Girl with a Pearl Earring
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Paul said he hoped other people would learn from his misfortune.
From BBC ● Sep. 27, 2026
Everyone knows the championship is basically over, barring some kind of dramatic misfortune.
From BBC ● Sep. 23, 2026
If Wendy Wasserstein wrote a worse play than “An American Daughter,” I hope I never have the misfortune of seeing it.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 20, 2026
"He was a star... He had chosen the spotlight," Ditum argued, acknowledging that his story had the "misfortune" to break in the middle of a summer news vacuum.
From Barron's ● Aug. 19, 2026
On the former score, Adams had the misfortune to become the first occupant of what he described as “the most insignificant office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived.”
From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" by Joseph J. Ellis
The vice president, meantime, experienced a series of misfortunes reminiscent of the classic children’s book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 12, 2026
Back pain, difficult childbirth, dental crowding and sinus infections are not random misfortunes.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 11, 2026
When manager Arne Slot and Liverpool look back at this season, a crazy January afternoon when they drew 2-2 at Fulham will go a long way to summing up their misfortunes.
From BBC ● Jan. 4, 2026
The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes.
From Salon ● Oct. 23, 2025
At the time of which I am telling you he had been subjected to a series of misfortunes.
From "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
