Countercyclical

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Dampening the cyclical fluctuations due to the business cycle in an economy.
  2. 2
    Moving in the direction opposite to that of the overall state of an economy.

    "The unemployment rate is countercyclical in the sense that it rises when economic growth is low and vice versa."

Synonyms

All synonyms
acyclical

Example

More examples

"The unemployment rate is countercyclical in the sense that it rises when economic growth is low and vice versa."

Etymology

From counter- + cyclical.

Related phrases

business cycle

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.