W. H. Whyte
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Hapless literally means what you'd expect it to mean: "without hap"—hap being another word for fortune or luck. Hap derives from the Old Norse word for "good luck," a word that is also the source of our happen and happy. English has several words to describe those lacking good fortune, including ill-starred, ill-fated, unlucky, and luckless, a word formed in parallel to hapless by adding the suffix -less. Ill-starred suggests bringing calamity or the threat of a terrible fate ("the ill-starred year the Great Depression began"). Ill-fated refers only to being doomed ("the ill-fated voyage of the Titanic"). Unlucky and luckless usually apply to a person or thing notably or chronically unfortunate ("an unlucky slots player," "some luckless investors swindled in the deal").
Synonyms
Examples of hapless in a Sentence
Alex De Waal, Foreign Affairs, 8 Apr. 2024
Victims on the road trip included the hapless Washington Wizards and former teammate Jordan Poole, a decimated New York Knicks squad and finally a 120-115 win over a Toronto team that has lost 37 games.
—Jerry McDonald, The Mercury News, 4 Mar. 2024
That said, old tropes die hard, and this one — the hapless son who’s been emotionally mangled by a monster mother — has been entrenched in movies and television for close to 75 years.
—Mark Harris Keita Morimoto, New York Times, 27 Feb. 2024
The Heat took command early and showed absolutely no mercy, pounding the hapless Blazers with a flurry of threes, a franchise-record 41 assists and suffocating defense.
—Barry Jackson, Miami Herald, 30 Mar. 2024
And Annie, a friendly presence but hapless sleuth, commits one of the genre’s chief blunders: confronting a potential murderer by herself.
—Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor, 28 Mar. 2024
The gay men were breezy, bossy, confident; the straight men were generally hapless and abashed.
—Mark Harris Rf. Alvarez, New York Times, 11 Mar. 2024
Marquette for its part took care of business against hapless DePaul on Wednesday and enters this rematch with the Pirates on a three-game winning streak.
—USA TODAY, 26 Jan. 2024
Photo: Shutterstock As a foul-mouthed folk singer who takes her hapless ex-lover (Oscar Isaac) to task, Mulligan has all the funniest lines in the Coen brothers’ poignant tribute to the Greenwich Village music scene of the early ’60s.
—Radhika Seth, Vogue, 3 Mar. 2024
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'hapless.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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Cite this Entry
“Hapless.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hapless. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.
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hapless
adjective
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