unavailing
Americanadjective
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of unavailing
Explanation
Something that's unavailing doesn't achieve the desired results. After an unavailing search for a pair of matching socks, you were forced to wear a blue and green striped sock on one foot and a pink polka-dotted sock on the other. When your efforts are ineffective, they're unavailing. A teacher's unavailing attempt to keep your class quiet means that the noise continues, and an underdog basketball team's unavailing struggle to make up the ten-point lag at halftime means they ultimately lose the game. This adjective comes from the now-obsolete availing, "advantageous," combined with the prefix un-, "not."
Vocabulary lists containing unavailing
Beowulf
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The Souls of Black Folk
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How the Other Half Lives
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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.
So far, though, the efforts have been unavailing.
From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 24, 2024
That memo also includes an analysis of why, in the authors’ views, those defenses are generally unavailing with respect to criminal charges.
From Slate • Jul. 20, 2023
On the negative side, the crisis has shone a spotlight on London as a magnet for corrupt Russian money and the government’s unavailing efforts to clean it up so far.
From New York Times • Mar. 9, 2022
Repeated attempts to reach the church and its pastor, Jared Lett, were unavailing.
From Washington Times • Dec. 23, 2021
Yet through 1947, Lawrence’s attempts to capture an artificially produced meson on photographic film were unavailing.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
Definitions 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.
