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star-crossed

/stɑrkrɔst/
IPA guide

When it seems like you're doomed to have bad luck, you're star-crossed. You may feel like your camping plans are star-crossed if it rains every time you head into the woods with your sleeping bag.

Shakespeare coined this term in the prologue of Romeo and Juliet, when he described his tragic protagonists as "a pair of star-cross'd lovers." Right off the bat, he made it clear that these two will have terrible luck as they repeatedly try to be together. The stars themselves seem to be working against them, an idea that reflected the common 16th-century belief that the position of the stars could control a person's fate.

Definitions of star-crossed
  1. adjective
    marked by or promising bad fortune
    unfortunate
    not favored by fortune; marked or accompanied by or resulting in ill fortune
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