Unaware is an adjective. Unawares is an adverb. Unawares may sound like a colloquial variant of unaware, but in fact the word goes back centuries and is listed as an adverb in all the dictionaries we checked.
Unawares can mean without awareness, but it’s usually used to mean, more specifically, by surprise or unexpectedly. It appears most often in the phrase caught unawares.
Examples
These writers correctly use unawares as an adverb:
But the personal equivalent of an earthquake followed by a nuclear catastrophe always catches us unawares. [Chicago Tribune]
More than 300,000 British savers were caught unawares when Icelandic internet bank Icesave collapsed in 2008. [Telegraph]
He noted that Russia, like the rest of the world, was caught unawares by the upheaval. [Wall Street Journal]
And in this example, unawares is incorrectly used as an adjective:
And for those of you who are unawares of the man’s prowess, I’ll point to this stellar reggae mix he made last year [LA Times]
This could be a typo. Whatever the case, unawares should be replaced with unaware.
