The phrase "avert misfortune" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when discussing actions taken to prevent bad luck or unfortunate events from occurring.
Example: "She took every precaution to avert misfortune during her travels, ensuring that she had all necessary documents and insurance."
Alternatives: "prevent disaster" or "avoid calamity".
A Brahminical deity invoked in Siam to avert misfortune, etc. Pra Suk, riding an ox and holding a snake-shaped bow.
Maasai held them at arm's length, but believed that they had access to cosmological truths hidden from ordinary people, and could use their knowledge to avert misfortune and to protect the community from sorcery.
The company pray to the gods to avert misfortune and welcome love as the only alternative to pain and devastation.
But they who so thought were themselves more truly insensible not to see how much a noble nature and education avail to conquer any affliction; and though fortune may often be more successful, and may defeat the efforts of virtue to avert misfortunes, it cannot, when we incur them, prevent our hearing them reasonably.
Finally, some propitiatory sacrifices are clearly prophylactic, intended to avert possible misfortune and calamity, and as such they are really bribes offered to the gods.
And in doing so I always felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.
To honor the pagan gods was to expect their protection and avert the misfortunes, whether famine, disease, or drought, that might result from their neglect.
Julianus also killed many boys as a magic rite, believing that he could avert some future misfortunes if he learned of them beforehand.
Hoping to avert future financial misfortunes, Julian and Gillian Foulger, a geophysicist at the University of Durham in England, have developed a cheap way for companies to map their reservoirs: seismic tomography, a technique used to image Earth's crust and mantle.
Misfortune has been piled on misfortune.
Also: misfortune hunters.
