wanspeed means ill fortune. It carries an Arena rating of 1514, earned across 12 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, wanspeed ranks #2,025 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #2,130 of 17,131 for Scariest Words, #2,393 of 17,151 for The Improbable, #4,286 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words.
Why “wanspeed” is a great word
WANSPEED — [Noun] A chronic state of ill fortune or adversity arising from a fundamental lack of prosperity. From Middle English wanspede, from Old English wanspēd (literally "lack of prosperity"), equivalent to the Old English prefix wan- ("lacking, deficient") + speed ("prosperity, success"). Unlike "misfortune," which suggests a discrete stroke of bad luck, or "poverty," which denotes primarily material lack, wanspeed evokes a pervasive, inherited condition of being starved of good fortune itself. It is the persistent grey drizzle over a fallow field, the unvarying thinness of a family’s ancestral broth, and the hollow echo in a purse that has never known the comforting weight of coin—a lucklessness woven into the very fiber of a life.
Etymology
From Middle English wanspede, from Old English wanspēd (“poverty, want”, literally “lack of prosperity”), equivalent to wan- + speed.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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