Word.ws English Dictionary

down on one's luck

down on one's luck adjective: unlucky or undergoing a period of bad luck, especially with respect to financial matters.

Adjective

down on one's luck (comparative more down on one's luck, superlative most down on one's luck)

  1. (idiomatic) Unlucky or undergoing a period of bad luck, especially with respect to financial matters.
    • I'm sorry to hear you are down on your luck ;1895, Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan: or The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire […], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, published...
    • If Crabtree is down on his luck he will most likely be willing to do anything for money.1915, Edward Stratemeyer, chapter 28, in The Rover Boys in Business

Forms of down on one's luck

comparativemore down on one's luck
superlativemost down on one's luck

Questions about down on one's luck

What does down on one's luck mean?
Down on one's luck means unlucky or undergoing a period of bad luck, especially with respect to financial matters.
What part of speech is down on one's luck?
Down on one's luck is an adjective.

Words near down on one's luck in the dictionary

  1. down lines
  2. down low
  3. down lows
  4. down mattress
  5. down on one's knees
  6. down on one's luck
  7. down on one's uppers
  8. down pat
  9. down payment
  10. down payments
  11. down perm

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: down on one's luck (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-down on one's luck.ogg.

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