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or unfavorable fortune or fate; a condition marked by misfortune, calamity, or distress:
friends will show their true colors in times of adversity.
an adverse or unfortunate event or circ-mstance:
you will meet many adversities in life.
historical examples

but with our own distempers and adversities it is altogether different.
thoughts on man william g-dwin

ye have this day rejected your g-d, who himself saved you out of all adversities.
orthography elmer w. cavins

why, her grief over the country’s adversities must have cut her life short.
great men and famous women. vol. 2 of 8 various

and he, a man of experience and adversities, was not the kind of man to be indifferent to her courtesy.
the forged note oscar micheaux

when loyalty itself is created, it finds itself beset by adversities.
the sources of religious insight josiah royce

in it we will drown our adversities, and in its fire consume our sorrows.
the lands of the saracen bayard taylor

there the boy led the backwoods life, and struggled with all its adversities in his love of books, until he was nineteen.
stories of ohio william dean howells

a tender affection, cemented by their adversities, existed between james stuart and his sons.
memoirs of the jacobites of 1715 and 1745 mrs. thomson

the old amiable submission to adversities had given place to an expression of petulance, of resentment, of cunning, of cowardice.
children of the desert louis dodge

but evidently the sea represents the pleasures, and the hills and rocks the adversities, of life.
st. bernard of clairvaux’s life of st. malachy of armagh h. j. lawlor

noun (pl) -ties
distress; affliction; hardship
an unfortunate event or incident
n.

c.1200, aduersite “misfortune, hardship, difficulty,” from old french aversité “adversity, calamity, misfortune; hostility, wickedness, malice” (modern french adversité), from latin adversitatem (nominative adversitas) “opposition,” from adversus (see adverse).