How to Use unawares in a Sentence

unawares

adverb
  • An early freeze that catches a tree unawares can do the same or can cause its leaves to turn straight from green to brown before falling off.
    — Meghan Bartels, Scientific American, 18 Oct. 2024
  • Still, workers were caught unawares by the shutdown, Ball and Nava said.
    — Sacbee.com, 9 Oct. 2025
  • The Center for Disease Control does not want you to be caught unawares.
    — Kyle Munkittrick, Discover Magazine, 20 May 2011
  • The drivers were taken unawares when empty cans and bottles showered them and one driver jumped in his cab and departed.
    — Nan Randall, The Atlantic, 25 Jan. 2018
  • Herbert also said he had been caught unawares by the attorney general’s actions.
    — Daedan Olander, The Salt Lake Tribune, 7 Mar. 2022
  • Likewise, thousands of pedestrians walk unawares over dozens of old ships buried beneath the streets of the city’s financial district.
    — Greg Miller, National Geographic, 2 June 2017
  • After all, one of the worst moves investors can make is letting a recession catch them unawares and bailing on their portfolios in response.
    — Q.ai - Powering A Personal Wealth Movement, Forbes, 11 Jan. 2023
  • Sure enough, Trinity was caught unawares, and audiences everywhere were gagged.
    — Stephen Daw, Billboard, 2 July 2018
  • However, Zhao notes that even if the government has the technology needed to spot such fakes, the public might be caught unawares.
    — Will Knight, Wired, 28 May 2021
  • In the case of Hungary, EU leaders may have been caught unawares by Orban’s assaults on democracy.
    — R. Daniel Kelemen, Foreign Affairs, 25 Aug. 2016
  • The author caught unawares on the steps of Perugia's Cattedrale San Lorenzo, bag by his side.
    — Charlie Hobbs, Condé Nast Traveler, 20 Sep. 2024
  • Its violent, zero-to-hero power delivery could catch drivers unawares, knocking the car off-balance, then frequently backwards into a hedge.
    — Tim Pitt, Robb Report, 15 Dec. 2022
  • Michael Packard was diving off the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Friday, when the capital cetacean caught him unawares.
    — Evan Simko-Bednarski, CNN, 11 June 2021
  • From my perspective, there’s no excuse for being caught unawares, and clinging to the easier or cheaper option is a far riskier business decision than exploring other avenues now.
    — Sjoerd Fauser, Forbes, 25 Apr. 2022
  • However, PetSmart was caught unawares when Symancyk announced his leaving a day before Signet made its announcement.
    — Pamela N. Danziger, Forbes, 3 Oct. 2024
  • The Senate, seemingly caught unawares, initially refused to accept delivery of the subpoenaed material for lack of a secure place to store it.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 25 Apr. 2021
  • During the second wave, villages in India were caught unawares, with severe underreporting of both cases and Covid-19 deaths.
    — Amanda Shendruk, Quartz, 21 Sep. 2021
  • Pictorial imagery catches us unawares because, as intellectuals, we are trained to analyze text and to treat drawings or photographs as trifling adjuncts.
    — Stephen Jay Gould, Discover Magazine, 11 Nov. 2019
  • The career of Marco Bellocchio has been extensive, fertile, and constantly capable of taking us unawares.
    — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 15 July 2022
  • But Clark also wants to see lawmakers and political leaders get a head start in talking about Deepfake technologies so that they don’t get caught unawares by a political scandal.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 14 Mar. 2023
  • To deter customers from doing research—to reconstruct the gloriously profitable world of information asymmetry—companies need to catch them unawares.
    — Tad Friend, The New Yorker, 1 Aug. 2022
  • Consequently, Baghdad was caught unawares when protests did break out in the capital and in cities such as Mosul in early February, and its initial response was rather panicked.
    — Raad Alkadiri, Foreign Affairs, 3 Mar. 2011
  • China was caught unawares by a disease that was evidently spreading for a month or more in Wuhan before anyone noticed; the country’s frantic learning now is helping save the lives everywhere of the sickest cases.
    — Holman W. Jenkins, WSJ, 3 Mar. 2020
  • While the Terrans struggle to suppress a rebel faction incensed by humanity's alliance with the alien Vasudans, they're caught unawares by the return of an existential threat to the peace-loving species of the galaxy.
    — Alan Bradley, Space.com, 7 Oct. 2025
  • At a Republican rally in August, Johnson was caught unawares by Windsor, who quizzed him about the 2020 presidential contest.
    — Daniel Bice, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 16 Nov. 2021
  • Over the past 30 years, we have been caught unawares by bovine tuberculosis in African lions, canine distemper virus in Siberian seals and tigers, and leprosy in North American armadillos.
    — Stephen Harrison, Discover Magazine, 10 Nov. 2016
  • On the other hand, Newcastle don't have a shortlist of managers prepared at all say the Times, with Benitez's impending departure catching them unawares, despite, y'know, being quite a while coming and very, very obvious.
    — SI.com, 25 June 2019
  • The unfinished portrait drawing was a Regency fashion, as executed by professional society artists Thomas Lawrence and Richard Cosway, where the intention was to capture personality unawares, unstudied, as in life.
    — Literary Hub, 4 Aug. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'unawares.' 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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