Are there differences in usage between unsuccess and failure?
Is failure harsher to hear than unsuccess? In other words, is unsuccess a euphemism of failure?
Learn English – “Unsuccess” versus “failure”
differencesnounsword-choice
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Best Answer
By most people's definition, unsuccess is not a word. It's easy to understand even if you've never seen it before, so a few people are bound to use it. But we're talking about very few people...
Most nouns don't have an unambiguous "opposite" that we can invoke with a negating prefix, and for those that do, we usually use the non- prefix anyway.
Offhand the only nouns I can think of that we negate using un- are already-inflected "abstract" forms such as unconsciousness, unhelpfulness, unwillingness. But note that unsuccessfulness is even less common than unsuccess - probably because it's just too much of a mouthful.
EDIT: Thanks to @Unreason (who with that name has a vested interest in the matter!) for pointing out that there are a handful of un[noun] negations. Of which unrest is universally accepted, as to a lesser extent are unconcern, unreason, unbelief, etc. But in such cases the stem word usually also functions as a verb. The exception being unbelief, which I believe to be a pathological formulation primarily associated with poetic and pseudo-academic contexts (the standard negated form is disbelief).