unlikely
/ʌnˈlaɪkli/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.31 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Not likely; improbable; not to be reasonably expected.
adj
Not holding out a prospect of success; likely to fail; unpromising.
adv
In an improbable manner.
noun
Something or somebody considered unlikely.
Example Sentences
- "It is pretty unlikely that you'll win, but I will pray that at least you do well."
- "In the highly unlikely event of landing in water, lifejackets are stored under the seat."
- "Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped the wear of time for immemorial years was a strange, and for me, a most fortunate thing. Yet oddly enough I found here a far more unlikely substance, and that was camphor."
- "The Saturday evening Cardiff-West Wales mail train is still steam-worked, but a most unlikely locomotive used on May 23 was Stanier Class 5 4-6-0 No. 45250 (5A); it returned on May 25 with a train of steel billets."
- "Saturday’s tariffs are unlikely to be Trump’s last. The president said himself said in the Oval Office that additional tariffs could come by mid-February on chips, pharmaceuticals, steel, aluminum, copper, oil and gas imports – along with tariffs on the European Union – all threats that few would discount given his willingness to follow through on the North American and China tariffs on Saturday."
- "Nor had the post mortem on Newson's body revealed any illness or other physical condition that might have prevented him from applying the brake, although after four days in the oven-like heat of the wreckage, the body was so badly decomposed as to make any reliable post mortem results unlikely."
Etymology
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: unlykely,unlikly,unlykly,unlicli
Inflected Forms
unlikelier (comparative)
more unlikely (comparative)
unlikeliest (superlative)
most unlikely (superlative)
unlikelies (plural)