Other forms: misfortunes
Misfortune is bad luck, or an event caused by it. Suffer a misfortune, by misfortune, a run of misfortunes.
It is a formal word that says nobody was to blame, which is precisely why insurers and lawyers use it. Wilde's line about losing one parent being a misfortune and both looking like carelessness is the joke everybody knows it from.
1nounmisfortuneBad luck, or an event caused by it.
“She had the misfortune to break her leg on the first day of her holiday.”
misfortune is bad luck.
From mis- + fortune.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA