How to Use ill-fated in a Sentence

ill-fated

adjective
  • Despite the glamour of the celebration, the union of course was ill-fated.
    — Taijuan Moorman, USA Today, 3 July 2026
  • Jeffrey, a divorced former Army Ranger, embarks on a sudden and inevitably ill-fated life of crime to help provide for his kids.
    — Brian Truitt, USA Today, 8 Oct. 2025
  • What the Pentagon Papers revealed is that the American government had reason to know all along that the venture was ill-fated.
    — Louis Menand, New Yorker, 13 Apr. 2026
  • So, where will Season 2 take us, Mayor Tom Loftis, and the rest of this wonderfully funny and spectacularly ill-fated island community?
    — Kate Erbland, IndieWire, 11 June 2026
  • The series then retreats to 2019 to trace the circumstances that led to these killings, building toward the inevitability of Maggie and Paul’s death and filtering the whole family through a lens of catastrophe, where every member is either ill-fated or devious.
    — Roxana Hadadi, Vulture, 24 Oct. 2025
  • But this was the first of three Terence Fisher Frankenstein films to substitute the iconic Monster for an equivalent and ill-fated experiment; in this case, a paralysed hospital assistant Karl (Oscar Quitak) who agrees to have his brain transplanted into an able body (Michael Gwynn).
    — Rory Doherty, Vulture, 20 Oct. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ill-fated.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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