resilience means the mental ability to recover quickly from depression, illness or misfortune. It carries an Arena rating of 1410, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, resilience ranks #138 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words, #1,186 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #2,302 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #4,177 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words.
resilience is pronounced /ɹɪˈzɪl.ɪ.əns/.
Why “resilience” is a great word
The capacity to recover from difficulty, or of a material to return to its original form after deformation, from the Latin verb *resilire* ('to jump back, recoil'), a compound of *re-* ('back') and *salire* ('to jump, leap'), first attested in English in the 1620s. Unlike 'fragility,' which denotes an inherent susceptibility to breakage without hope of restoration, or 'perseverance,' which emphasizes stubborn persistence rather than the act of restoration, resilience is the quiet physics of return. It is the steel spring compressed and released, the meadow of wildflowers returning after the fire, the mind rediscovering its old contours after grief—each a quiet testament that what leaps back carries the memory of pressure, but not its final form.
Etymology
From Latin resiliō (“to spring back”) + English -ence.
noun
- The mental ability to recover quickly from depression, illness or misfortune.e.g.“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.” — 2021, Lisa Miller, The Awakened Brain, Ch.2, at p.36
- The physical property of material that can resume its shape after being stretched or deformed; elasticity.
- 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).
- The capacity to resist destruction or defeat, especially when under extreme pressure.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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