Meaning & use
resilience
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Meanings
noununcountable
The ability to recover quickly from difficulties, setbacks, shock, or hardship.
Grammar: Usually uncountable; can take to: resilience to stress.
Patterns
- emotional/psychological resilience
- resilience to something
- show/build resilience
Children often show surprising resilience after a move.
Her resilience helped her return to work after illness.
Exercise can build resilience to everyday stress.
noununcountabletechnicalphysics
The capacity of a material or system to return to its original form or function after stress or deformation.
Grammar: Technical sense; contrast resistance, which opposes force rather than recovering afterward.
Patterns
- material resilience
- resilience of a system
- stress resilience
Rubber has high resilience and springs back quickly.
Engineers test the resilience of the bridge design.
The grid showed resilience after the power surge.
Common combinations
- emotional resilience
- Mindfulness training may support emotional resilience.
- resilience to stress
- Good sleep improves resilience to stress.
- build resilience
- Small failures can help students build resilience.
- economic resilience
- Diverse industries gave the town economic resilience.
Synonyms and how they differ
- toughness
- Emphasizes enduring or resisting damage; resilience specifically highlights bouncing back after stress.
- flexibility
- Means bending or adapting easily; it may prevent damage but not always recovery.
- adaptability
- Focuses on adjusting to new conditions, not necessarily returning after a setback.
- stamina
- Sustained energy or endurance over time; different from recovery from a shock.
Opposites
Word family
- resilient adjective
- Able to recover quickly from difficulty or return to shape.
- resiliently adverb
- In a resilient way; somewhat formal.
Commonly confused: resilience or resistance? resilience or strength?
resilience vs resistance
Resistance opposes force, change, or disease; resilience is the capacity to recover afterward.
resilience vs strength
Strength is power or durability; resilience adds the idea of recovery after being knocked down.
Practice
After the flood, the town showed ___ by rebuilding homes and reopening schools quickly.
Choose one answer.
The sentence describes recovering after a setback, which is resilience. Resistance opposes something, resolution is determination or a decision, and reticence means being reserved.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “resilience”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.