Not getting back what your effort deserved. It describes work, hard effort, patience or loyalty that produced nothing in return — no prize, no thanks, no result. The most common shapes are 'go unrewarded' and 'remain unrewarded': 'her years of hard work went unrewarded'. Notice that 'go unrewarded' construction; it is where the word lives most naturally. Two shades of meaning sit inside it. Sometimes the missing reward is money or a prize — the promotion that never came. Sometimes it is simply the outcome you were working toward — an unrewarded effort that produced no success at all. Often it carries a note of unfairness: the writer thinks someone should have received something and did not. Because of that, it appears a lot in sport reporting ('their dominance went unrewarded' — they played better but did not score) and in stories about workers, carers and volunteers. It is fairly formal and mostly written. It also turns up in a stubborn hopeful phrase: 'virtue is its own reward' has a shadow twin in the idea that good deeds often go unrewarded — a small, dry complaint about how the world works.

沒有得到回報的、白費的（努力沒有回饋、也沒有結果）