"Unsuccess" versus "failure"

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?

Solution 1:

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).

Solution 2:

Nobody uses the word "unsuccess". Its meaning is obvious, so you can use it as a euphemism for failure, but your readers will find it odd.

Solution 3:

Personally, I've never heard anyone using 'unsuccess', simply because the term isn't valid. If you want to use the word opposite to 'success' you use the word 'failure'. If you insist on using 'unsuccess', at least find it used in context to make sure you can do so, not just a dictionary entry.