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Happy-go-lucky   /hˈæpi-goʊ-lˈəki/   Listen
adjective
Happy  adj.  (compar. happier; superl. happiest)  
1.
Favored by hap, luck, or fortune; lucky; fortunate; successful; prosperous; satisfying desire; as, a happy expedient; a happy effort; a happy venture; a happy omen. "Chymists have been more happy in finding experiments than the causes of them."
2.
Experiencing the effect of favorable fortune; having the feeling arising from the consciousness of well-being or of enjoyment; enjoying good of any kind, as peace, tranquillity, comfort; contented; joyous; as, happy hours, happy thoughts. "Happy is that people, whose God is the Lord." "The learned is happy Nature to explore, The fool is happy that he knows no more."
3.
Dexterous; ready; apt; felicitous. "One gentleman is happy at a reply, another excels in a in a rejoinder."
Happy family, a collection of animals of different and hostile propensities living peaceably together in one cage. Used ironically of conventional alliances of persons who are in fact mutually repugnant.
Happy-go-lucky, trusting to hap or luck; improvident; easy-going. "Happy-go-lucky carelessness."





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Happy-go-lucky" Quotes from Famous Books



... suggests most horribly to me how far behind we must be in all matters of ingenuity, device, and mechanical contrivance. I am reminded again of the days during the Boer war, when one realised that it had never occurred to our happy-go-lucky Army that it was possible to make a military use of barbed wire or construct a trench to defy shrapnel. Suppose in the North Sea we got a surprise like that, and fished out a parboiled, half-drowned admiral explaining what a confoundedly slim, unexpected, almost ungentlemanly ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly pervasive of the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago—say, fifteen or twenty—it was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known at all with many in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges, or the time of the happy-go-lucky sailor William; in the earlier time of Victoria, it was a chivalrous devotion among the classes, and with the masses an affection which almost no other sovereign has inspired. I should not be going farther than some ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... hanging head and bursting heart. She believed herself the most unhappy girl in England. She loved; who could help loving happy-go-lucky, handsome Tom Arundel, who well-nigh worshipped the ground her little feet trod upon? It was the first love and the only love of her life, and of nights she lay awake picturing his bright, young boyish face, hearing again all the things he had said to her till her heart was well-nigh ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... Pan earnestly. "I don't want to be a kill-joy. Things do look wonderful for us. But I haven't dared yet to let myself go. You're a happy-go-lucky devil and Dad is past the age of fight. It won't stay before his mind. But I feel fight. And I can't be gay because something tells me the fight ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... claims were ever seriously advanced, and the whole of the continent and adjacent islands were ceded to the English in much the same happy-go-lucky fashion that we recently let slip a large portion of New Guinea. One cause of the apathy displayed was without doubt the forbidding nature of the reports published by all the navigators. The coast line had been examined, and the various inlets followed up without any important or navigable ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc


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