Misfortune
nounBad luck, or an unfortunate event or condition.
How to spell misfortune
10 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce misfortune
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does misfortune mean?
- nounBad luck, or an unfortunate event or condition.
Misfortune in a sentence
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The family suffered the misfortune of losing their home in the flood.
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Through no fault of his own, he met with one misfortune after another.
Where does misfortune come from?
Language of origin: Latin
This word joins the native English prefix mis-, meaning 'bad' or 'wrongly', to the noun fortune, which English took from Old French fortune in the 1300s. That French word descended from the Latin fortuna, the name of the Roman goddess of luck and chance, and fortuna itself was rooted in fors, meaning 'chance' or 'that which befalls a person'. Originally fortune could mean good luck or bad luck equally, simply 'whatever fate brings', so adding mis- pinned the meaning firmly to the unlucky side. The compound appeared in English by the 1400s to name a piece of bad luck or a calamity. The spelling trap lives in the ending: the -tune is pronounced like the unstressed 'chun', so writers must remember it shares its tail with the word fortune rather than spelling it phonetically.
How the word is built
- mis- (bad, wrong)
- fortune (luck, fate, from Latin fortuna)
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