Meaning & use
complacency
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Meanings
noununcountabledisapproving
A lazy kind of satisfaction in which you stop working hard or watching for problems because you feel safe.
Grammar: Uncountable, often followed by about or over: complacency about safety.
Patterns
- complacency about something
- complacency over something
Complacency about safety led to the accident.
The team's early lead bred complacency, and they lost.
There is no room for complacency while the virus is still spreading.
noununcountableformalold-fashioned
A calm, contented feeling about yourself, sometimes with no real reason for pride.
Grammar: Less common today and also usually negative.
Patterns
- with complacency
She looked around the room with quiet complacency.
His complacency irritated the neighbors.
He accepted the praise with an air of complacency.
Common combinations
- breed complacency
- Easy success can breed complacency.
- guard against complacency
- Coaches warned players to guard against complacency.
- a sense of complacency
- A sense of complacency settled over the office.
- no room for complacency
- There is no room for complacency in a fast-changing market.
- complacency about
- Complacency about security cost the firm dearly.
- fall into complacency
- Companies that fall into complacency often decline.
Synonyms and how they differ
- self-satisfaction
- Self-satisfaction stresses pleasure in yourself, while complacency adds the danger of not preparing for risks.
- smugness
- Smugness is about showing off your pride, while complacency can be quiet and private.
- contentment
- Contentment is positive and healthy, whereas complacency suggests an unwise lack of effort.
- apathy
- Apathy means lack of interest or care, but complacency comes from feeling there is no need to care.
Opposites
Word family
- complacent adjective
- too satisfied to take care or make an effort
- complacently adverb
- in a self-satisfied way
- complacence noun
- a less common variant of complacency
- placid adjective
- calm and not easily upset
Commonly confused: complacency or complaisance? complacency or compliance?
complacency vs complaisance
Complaisance means willingness to please others. It sounds like complacency but has a different meaning.
complacency vs compliance
Compliance means following rules or requests, which is unrelated to feeling too satisfied.
Practice
After three easy wins, the coach warned the team to guard against ___.
Choose one answer.
After easy wins, a team risks feeling too safe and stopping effort, which is complacency. Competence, compliance and complaint do not fit as a danger caused by success.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “complacency”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.