as in unfortunate
having, prone to, or marked by bad luck
a luckless team with the worst record in the league
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Recent Examples of luckless
Any one of those locations could have allowed the heat of reentry to burn through the aluminum alloy walls of the spacecraft, killing any luckless crew that may have been inside, in much the kind of reentry breakup that doomed the shuttle Columbia and its seven-person crew in 2003.
—
Jeffrey Kluger, Time, 11 Apr. 2026
Vasyanovych plays Roman, a luckless director who’s out of work and trying to shoot his latest film in a country whose dwindling population is still traumatized by the war.
—Christopher Vourlias, Variety, 6 Sep. 2025
Jeffrey Kluger, Time, 11 Apr. 2026
Vasyanovych plays Roman, a luckless director who’s out of work and trying to shoot his latest film in a country whose dwindling population is still traumatized by the war.
—Christopher Vourlias, Variety, 6 Sep. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for luckless
Adjective
-
So that was just an unfortunate situation, but everything’s OK.—
Zach Dean,
FOXNews.com,
12 June 2026
-
Getting into a dispute with your neighbor is an unfortunate but all-too-common predicament for many homeowners.—
Michele Laufik,
Martha Stewart,
11 June 2026
Adjective
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The European Commission froze billions of euros in funds for Hungary in response to democratic backsliding led by Orbán, and concern lingers about the damage that can be done when one unhappy government insists on wielding its veto.—
ABC News,
ABC News,
15 June 2026
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Social media is making children unhappy and is designed to be addictive, Starmer said at a press conference.—
Elsa Ohlen,
CNBC,
15 June 2026
Adjective
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In a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, friends likened my outfit to that of Meredith Blake, the hapless fiancée in The Parent Trap.—
C Pam Zhang,
Travel + Leisure,
11 June 2026
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That also means that the Blue Jays (32-34), Athletics (31-34), Orioles (31-35), Twins (30-37), Astros (30-37) and Red Sox (27-36) are all within four games of that third wild-card spot, leaving just the Tigers (27-39), Royals (27-36) and hapless Angels (25-41) as likely sellers.—
Levi Weaver,
New York Times,
8 June 2026
Adjective
-
This study marks the first to use that data to model climate as rising temperatures are expected to fuel more disastrous events, from marine heat waves that kill coral to droughts.—
Jenny Staletovich,
Sun Sentinel,
14 June 2026
-
The next two decades were mostly disastrous.—
Sean Gregory,
Time,
14 June 2026
Adjective
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Monroe was famously unlucky in love.—
Angela Andaloro,
PEOPLE,
9 June 2026
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Sue’s just the only one unlucky enough to have had to die for it.—
Angie Han,
HollywoodReporter,
9 June 2026
Adjective
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All the usual fun Indy stuff is here – Nazis, treasured artifacts – though the bantering chemistry between Ford's hard-luck hero and Sean Connery as his grumpy dad is off-the-hook spectacular.—
Brian Truitt,
USA Today,
13 June 2026
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Both her audition and her callback had fallen flat, but the company must have figured that casting an amateur from hard-luck Butte as Lucetta would make good press.—
Jonathan Franzen,
New Yorker,
1 June 2026
Cite this Entry
“Luckless.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/luckless. Accessed 21 Jun. 2026.
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