Unusual means not what normally happens. A queue outside the bakery at six in the morning, snow falling in April, your quiet neighbour singing in the garden.
The adverb is unusually: unusually warm, unusually quiet. It is a soft word, much gentler than strange or weird, and it does not say whether the difference is good or bad. It also stretches to mean remarkable, and there the difference is entirely good: a pianist of unusual talent is not odd, she is very fine. The pattern to learn is it is unusual for someone to do something, as in it is unusual for him to be late. And nothing unusual is how you say everything looked normal, the way police reports do.
1adjectiveunusualNot what normally happens; different from the ordinary.~98%
“It is unusual for the shop to close this early on a Friday.”
2adjectiveremarkableRemarkable; greater or better than the ordinary.~2%
“She has an unusual gift for languages.”
synonyms: remarkable, exceptional
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₃eyt- — to take along, fetch
Latin
ūsuālis — for use, fit for use, also of common use, customary, common, ordinary, usual
Old French
usuel
Middle English
usual
English
usual
English, today
unusual
Built from
From un- + usual. usual comes from Middle English usual, from Old French usuel, from Latin ūsuālis (“for use, fit for use, also of common use, customary, common, ordinary, usual”), from ūsus (“use, habit, custom”), from the past participle stem of utor (“to use”), possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European h₃eyt- (“to take along, fetch”). Displaced native ġewunelīċ.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA