Meaning & use
isolated incident
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Meaning
nouncountable
A single event, usually a bad one, that happened once and is not part of a pattern or likely to be repeated.
Grammar: Usually preceded by an or an: it was an isolated incident; the plural isolated incidents is also common.
Patterns
- an isolated incident involving something
- treat something as an isolated incident
The police said the burglary was an isolated incident and that residents were not in danger.
The airline described the delay as an isolated incident caused by a software fault.
Teachers insisted that the argument in the hallway was an isolated incident.
Word forms
| plural | isolated incidents |
|---|
Common combinations
- an isolated incident
- The manager called the complaint an isolated incident.
- describe something as an isolated incident
- The company described the data leak as an isolated incident.
- not an isolated incident
- Sadly, this was not an isolated incident in the neighborhood.
- treat as an isolated incident
- We cannot treat the fire as an isolated incident when it happened twice this year.
- a series of isolated incidents
- Reporters linked what looked like a series of isolated incidents to one cause.
Synonyms and how they differ
- one-off
- One-off is more casual and can describe good or bad events, while isolated incident sounds official and usually refers to something negative.
- single occurrence
- Single occurrence is plainer and more neutral, with none of the reassuring tone that isolated incident often carries.
- anomaly
- An anomaly is something that departs from the normal, whereas an isolated incident stresses that it happened only once.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: isolated incident or accident?
isolated incident vs accident
An accident is something unintended that causes harm; an isolated incident can be deliberate or accidental and the phrase is about it being a one-time event.
Practice
After the second power cut in a week, residents said the outage could no longer be called an ______.
Choose one answer.
Isolated incident means a one-time event, which no longer fits after repeated outages. The other options describe repeated things, so they would not be contrasted this way.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “isolated incident”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.