DISASTROUS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does disastrous mean? 

• DISASTROUS (adjective)
  The adjective DISASTROUS has 1 sense:

1. (of events) having extremely unfortunate or dire consequences; bringing ruin

  Familiarity information: DISASTROUS used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• DISASTROUS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

(of events) having extremely unfortunate or dire consequences; bringing ruin

Synonyms:

black; calamitous; disastrous; fatal; fateful

Context example:

a fateful error

Similar:

unfortunate (not favored by fortune; marked or accompanied by or resulting in ill fortune)

Derivation:

disaster (an event resulting in great loss and misfortune)

 Context examples 

A new paper shows that this disastrous effect was triggered by a previously unknown risk factor: flooding rice fields for farming.

(NASA Map Reveals a New Landslide Risk Factor, NASA)

The whole story would have been speedily formed under her active imagination; and every thing established in the most melancholy order of disastrous love.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

Pride goes before a fall, and the revengeful Snow turned the tables with disastrous success.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

Golden Price has forty thousand a year, but his clothes are disastrous.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Mistakes were disastrous.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

My father, who was watching over me, perceiving my restlessness, awoke me; the dashing waves were around, the cloudy sky above, the fiend was not here: a sense of security, a feeling that a truce was established between the present hour and the irresistible, disastrous future imparted to me a kind of calm forgetfulness, of which the human mind is by its structure peculiarly susceptible.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

A dream of their coming in with Dora; of the pew-opener arranging us, like a drill-sergeant, before the altar rails; of my wondering, even then, why pew-openers must always be the most disagreeable females procurable, and whether there is any religious dread of a disastrous infection of good-humour which renders it indispensable to set those vessels of vinegar upon the road to Heaven.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

The unsatisfactory appearance of it is due to the fact, said he, that on descending the river the boat was upset and the case which contained the undeveloped films was broken, with disastrous results.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I took advantage of the opportunity, and told her that my old master, Van Helsing, the great specialist, was coming to stay with me, and that I would put her in his charge conjointly with myself; so now we can come and go without alarming her unduly, for a shock to her would mean sudden death, and this, in Lucy's weak condition, might be disastrous to her.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

But when she married again—when she took that most disastrous step of marrying you, in short, said my aunt, to be plain—did no one put in a word for the boy at that time?

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)