We explain what an unforeseen event is, the origin of the term and in which areas it is used. Also, differences between unforeseen and improvised.
What is an unforeseen?
When we use the word unexpectedly, we can do it in two different senses that share, however, the root of its meaning. On the one hand, we use it as a noun, to refer to a situation that had not been foreseen, that is, one that takes by surprise: "To get home we had to overcome various unforeseen events."
On the other hand, we also use it as a adjective, to precisely point out the nature of surprise or unforeseen in an object, a situation or a person: "That night we had unforeseen visitors" or "the police must face an unforeseen demonstration."
In both cases, the word refers to what is impossible to foresee, something that is evident in its etymological origin, the union of Latin voices. im- (negation prefix), pre- ("Before") and visitus (a form of the verb vedere, "see"). So the unforeseen is what we have not been able to anticipate, which in a figurative sense we could not see before it was presented (pre-see).
The use of this word is common in areas that require planning, that is, to foresee expenses, movements or decisions of others, such as the administration and accounting (“Unforeseen expenses”), the sport (“Unforeseen plays”) or the meteorology ("Unforeseen rains"), to cite just a few examples.
They would therefore be synonyms unexpectedly the words sudden, surprising, unusual or unpredictable.
Unforeseen or unexpected?
These two words are essentially synonymous, since they both refer to what cannot be foreseen; but in the case of unforeseen it is possible that we use it as an adjective or as a noun, as we have seen previously, while improvised operates only as an adjective.
Thus, we can say that “we have had to face many unforeseen events in the race” or that “we have had to face many improvised situations in the race” (note that we have had to incorporate a noun in the second case).
Another use that should be clarified is that of the phrase “unexpectedly”, which has the same sense of unforeseen or improvised, that is, something that happened unexpectedly (for example: “the director arrived at the building unexpectedly”. case, the phrase always works as a adverb, and should not be confused with the forms "unexpectedly" or "unexpectedly", which are not accepted in the cult use of the idiom.