Resilience
noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 The mental ability to recover quickly from depression, illness or misfortune. countable, uncountable
"Martin Seligman's impressive body of research showed that a pessimistic explanatory style carves a path to depression, while an optimistic explanatory style leads to resilience."
- 2 the physical property of a material that can return to its original shape or position after deformation that does not exceed its elastic limit wordnet
- 3 The physical property of material that can resume its shape after being stretched or deformed; elasticity. countable, uncountable
- 4 an occurrence of rebounding or springing back wordnet
- 5 The positive capacity of an organizational system or company to adapt and return to equilibrium after a crisis, failure or any kind of disruption, including: an outage, natural disasters, man-made disasters, terrorism, or similar (particularly IT systems, archives). countable, uncountable
"Network Rail previously said it is determined to build upon the "significant changes" it has made since the accident, which have "helped us to manage the risk of severe weather to the network". It has invested millions to improve the resilience of the railway."
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- 6 The capacity to resist destruction or defeat, especially when under extreme pressure. countable, uncountable
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"In March 2014, the Administration launched the Climate Data Initiative, bringing together extensive open government data and innovation competitions to develop data-driven resilience tools for communities."
Etymology
From Latin resiliō (“to spring back”) + -ence.
Related phrases
More for "resilience"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.