Home › Environmental Policy & Sustainability Economics › Disaster Mitigation & Resilience › resilience

resilience

re-SILL-yents /rɪˈzɪliəns/

nounC1GRETOEFLIELTSUPSC

academicprofessionalscientific

The capacity of a system, community, or individual to recover quickly from difficulties or to absorb shocks while maintaining functionality.

Unlike mere strength, resilience implies flexibility and the ability to 'bounce back' rather than just 'not breaking'.

The story behind the word. The word comes from the Latin 'resilire', meaning 'to leap back' or 'rebound'. It was originally used in physics to describe the properties of materials like timber or elastic that return to their original shape after being compressed, before becoming a metaphor for human and societal recovery.

Word relationships

elasticity: Focuses on the physical ability to return to shape, whereas resilience is more systemic.
fortitude: Refers more to mental and emotional strength in the face of adversity.

fragility: The quality of being easily broken or damaged by external shocks.

Commonly confused with

robustness: Robustness is the ability to resist change; resilience is the ability to recover from it.

Word family

resilient (adjective): Able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.
resiliently (adverb): In a way that shows the ability to recover quickly.

Collocations

build resilience
economic resilience
climate resilience
psychological resilience

Example sentences

"Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks." Ecology and Systems Theory (Walker et al., 'Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–ecological Systems', 2004)
"The city's resilience was tested when the power grid failed during the record-breaking heatwave." Urban Planning

Memory hook

Think of a rubber band: it has high resilience because no matter how much you stretch it, it 'leaps back' to its original form. Resilience is the 're-leap' after a fall.

When not to use

Avoid using it to mean simple physical toughness; it usually implies a process of recovery or adaptation.

Fun facts

In ecology, a 'resilient' ecosystem can actually change its state significantly as long as it maintains its primary functions.
The term is now used in 'Resilience Engineering' to design software that handles errors gracefully.