resilience
Resilience is the capacity to bounce back after difficulty, shock or change, and in materials the tendency to return to an original shape.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Definitions
- The ability to recover quickly after difficulty, shock or change.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - The property of a material that springs back into shape after being bent or compressed.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)
Examples
- The team showed remarkable resilience after losing its first three matches.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - Rubber has more resilience than clay.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)
Usage
Resilience has two lives. In engineering and materials writing it is a physical property, measured rather than felt. In psychology, education and management it names the ability to recover, and it is there that the word has become fashionable, often as a policy goal attached to communities and workforces rather than to individuals. The register is formal, and in speech people more often say they bounced back.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)The noun is uncountable in both senses, so it takes no plural and no article in general use. It takes the preposition in before a difficult condition, as in resilience in the face of criticism or resilience in adversity, and it appears in the pattern the resilience to plus a verb. Verbs used with it are build, develop, strengthen and undermine.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Resilience is often confused with toughness. Toughness suggests not being affected, while resilience assumes the person or the material was bent and came back, which is why the physical image matters. A related error stretches the word to cover any endurance, including simply putting up with a bad situation, when it implies recovery rather than passive tolerance.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Word forms
Regular forms according to English morphology (editorial description).
word forms
| przypadek | forma |
|---|---|
| singular | resilience |
| plural | resiliences |
Word forms: Editorial team
Collocations
- build resilience
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - emotional resilience
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address) - resilience in the face of
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)
Synonyms · Antonyms
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)source
Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Etymology
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W. W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., Oxford 1910, open sourceRelated words
- resilient , adjective
Related entries
Questions and answers
What does resilience mean?
Resilience is the capacity to bounce back. Applied to people, teams or economies, it means recovering after a setback rather than avoiding one; applied to materials, it means returning to the original shape once the pressure is removed. Both senses depend on the same image of springing back into place.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)What is the difference between resilience and toughness?
Toughness describes something hard to damage, whereas resilience describes something that is damaged or bent and then returns. A steel plate is tough, and a rubber ball is resilient. Applied to people, resilience implies that the difficulty was real and that recovery followed, which is why it is not the same as refusing to show strain.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Is resilience countable?
It is normally uncountable: build resilience, emotional resilience, the resilience of the system. The plural resiliences is rare and appears when separate kinds or instances are being distinguished, which happens mainly in technical writing. Everyday prose is served well by the singular and no article.
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Editorial team (in-house source, no external address)Where does the word resilience come from?
Latin resilire meant to leap back, joining re, back, with salire, to leap. Skeat finds the English noun in Bacon’s Natural History, where it still refers to a physical rebounding. The psychological sense belongs to the twentieth century and was extended from that older, mechanical meaning.