unsuccessfully
/ˌʌnsəkˈsɛsfəli/adverb
unsuccessfully is spelled U-N-S-U-C-C-E-S-S-F-U-L-L-Y. The wrong spelling people search most is unsuccesfully: about 10 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 12 of all searches for the word. Unsuccessfully is an adverb meaning “Not successfully; without success; to no avail”.
How do you spell unsuccessfully?
Unsuccessfully is spelled U-N-S-U-C-C-E-S-S-F-U-L-L-Y. 2 wrong spellings are searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 2 in 10 of the searches for unsuccessfully in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
What does unsuccessfully mean?
adverb
- 1
Not successfully; without success; to no avail.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce unsuccessfully?
- /ˌʌnsəkˈsɛsfəli/
Unsuccessfully has 5 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-unsuccessfully.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of unsuccessfully
- more unsuccessfully comparative
- most unsuccessfully superlative
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is unsuccessfully?
Unsuccessfully appears 1.9 times per million words in written English, the 20,101st most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Unsuccessfully in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense not successfully; without success:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| Spanish | no exitosamente |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does unsuccessfully come from?
From unsuccessful + -ly or un- + successfully.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).