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
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The visible gap for the door mechanism running across the rear fenders is unfortunate, especially since more basic minivans showcase clean surfaces there.
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Here's Sophie Cunningham dominating another pre-game entrance before an unfortunate loss to Angel Reese last night.
Adjective
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Isdin Melatonik If traditional retinoids have left your sensitive skin unhappy, Isdin's Melatonik Recovery Night Serum offers a gentler approach with bakuchiol.
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Brown and the Celtics have both since denied speculation that the 29-year-old second-team All-NBA selection was unhappy with his role in Boston.
Adjective
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The hapless Qataris were reduced to nine players because of red cards in the chaotic match.
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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.
Adjective
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Labour has teetered on the edge of one for weeks after those disastrous local election results, and only Burnham’s inability to run before now seems to have delayed one.
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On Monday night, David Remnick interviewed Hillary Rodham Clinton for a live taping of The New Yorker Radio Hour, where the former First Lady spoke plainly about Joe Biden and the disastrous 2024 election.
Adjective
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France were perhaps unlucky to go out in the competition’s groups (not helped by the two-week boat journey across the Atlantic) but the teams that made the final, Uruguay and Argentina, were the best at the tournament.
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So goes an unlucky fisherman’s joke.
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.
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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.
Cite this Entry
“Luckless.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/luckless. Accessed 25 Jun. 2026.
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