"little did one know" meaning in English

See little did one know in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Adverb

Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-little did one know.wav
Head templates: {{en-adv|-}} little did one know (not comparable)
  1. Used to show a relevant fact that is unknown to a person, or that the result or sequence of events differs greatly from what one had expected with the little knowledge he or she had about the situation beforehand. Tags: not-comparable Related terms: next thing one knows Translations (Translations): mal saber (Portuguese)
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        {
          "text": "I was speaking ill of Fred; little did I know that he was right behind me, listening in.",
          "type": "example"
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        {
          "text": "Little did we know, we would be stuck in traffic for hours before finally making it back home.",
          "type": "example"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2013 November 6, Stephanie Slifer, “Michelle Knight, Cleveland kidnapping survivor, details horrific circumstances inside Ariel Castro's home”, in CBS News:",
          "text": "Knight said Castro told her, \"You're only going to be here as a friend, that's it. And I'll let you go on Christmas.\" Little did she know she would be held captive in his Cleveland home for more than ten years.",
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          "ref": "2012 May 13, Alistair Magowan, “Sunderland 0-1 Man Utd”, in BBC Sport:",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-12-08 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-12-04 using wiktextract (bb46d54 and 0c3c9f6). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.