- 1未能成功地、徒勞無功地。常見句型是「曾試圖…但未成功」。語氣中性，不帶嘲笑，所以新聞報導很愛用。
Unsuccessfully means you tried and it did not work. Both halves are there, and the trying half is essential — you cannot fail at something you never attempted. As an adverb it attaches to a verb of attempting: he tried unsuccessfully, she applied unsuccessfully, they searched unsuccessfully for hours. Very often the word 'try' is right there beside it, and the pair 'tried unsuccessfully to...' is the most common shape by far. Two things to feel about the tone. First, it is calm and neutral — it reports a fact without laughing at anyone. That is why news reports and formal writing prefer it: 'doctors worked unsuccessfully to revive him' is respectful in a way that 'they failed to revive him' is not quite. Second, it hints at real effort, sometimes long effort. Because of that neutral tone it belongs to written English. In talking, people simply say 'I tried but it didn't work' or 'no luck'. Position: it usually comes after the verb, or between 'tried' and 'to'.
From the word’s history
unsuccessful + -ly (or un- + successfully).
就是 unsuccessful 加上 -ly。
組成un- (not) + success + -ful (full of) + -ly (in that way). Built up in layers: success → successful → successfully → unsuccessfully.
同家族的字
- successfullythe positive form — the same word without un-
- successfulthe adjective the adverb is made from
- successthe root noun at the centre of the whole family
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
unsuccessfullyadv/ˌʌnsəkˈsɛsfəli/
- 1
Not successfully; without success; to no avail.
- Thereafter the route of the original line was followed to the harbour, beyond which an extension, a third of a mile long, led to the salt pans and a newly constructed inn, the "Stafford Arms", where Lady Stafford tried unsuccessfully to educate the locals to drink beer instead of a strong whisky.
- He’s like more successful but equally morally abhorrent right-wing undercover operative James O’Keefe’s non-union Mexican equivalent, a dunce whose one move involves incompetently attempting to frame figures of seemingly unimpeachable moral integrity, like Robert Mueller or good old Mayor Pete, as deviant sex criminals like Wohl’s God Donald Trump by unsuccessfully trying to get people to come forward with bogus sexual assault allegations.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。