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").
Examples of hapless in a Sentence
Olivia Waite, New York Times, 26 Feb. 2025
Reliable comedic turns from Rick Hoffman's hapless Louis and Sarah Rafferty's fierce Donna brought a lightness to the show and rounded out the ensemble.
—Eliana Dockterman, TIME, 23 Feb. 2025
Leo Woodall was four years old in 2001, when Renée Zellweger charmed global audiences as the titular hapless romantic of Bridget Jones’s Diary.
—Kalia Richardson, Rolling Stone, 22 Feb. 2025
The high point of Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s bitterly funny follow-up to his Oscar-winning Parasite, is a prolonged sequence in which the title character, a hapless schlub played by Robert Pattinson, explains how his life became a hellscape of technologically enabled immortality.
—Alison Willmore, Vulture, 15 Feb. 2025
See All Example Sentences for hapless
Cite this Entry
“Hapless.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hapless. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.
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hapless
adjective
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