3 uses
(click/touch triangles for details)
Definition
unlucky or unfortunate — often making others feel pity
- A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.Chapters 58-60 -- Brit; Squid; The Line (45% in)
- No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the...Chapters 61-63 -- Stubb Kills a Whale; The Dart; The Crotch (74% in)
- But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race.Chapters 91-93 -- The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud; Ambergris; The Castaway (72% in)
There are no more uses of "hapless" in Moby Dick.
Typical Usage
(best examples)