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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
dereliction
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
industrial
▪ It is striking how often nature thrives in the context of human negligence and industrial dereliction.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ From her point of view, failure to act would be a dereliction of governmental duty.
▪ I wonder what my father would make of the River Rouge dereliction.
▪ Its dereliction over the past two years had been a constant topic of conversation.
▪ Many parents, irrespective of class, must also stand condemned for similar dereliction of duty.
▪ More buildings were reclaimed from dereliction, more dormitories built for the resettlers flooding in daily, more facilities provided.
▪ The level of vandalism and dereliction should also be noted.
▪ To shift that burden to schools is a mistake, even a dereliction.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Dereliction

Dereliction \Der`e*lic"tion\, n. [L. derelictio.]

  1. The act of leaving with an intention not to reclaim or resume; an utter forsaking abandonment.

    Cession or dereliction, actual or tacit, of other powers.
    --Burke.

  2. A neglect or omission as if by willful abandonment.

    A total dereliction of military duties.
    --Sir W. Scott.

  3. The state of being left or abandoned.

  4. (Law) A retiring of the sea, occasioning a change of high-water mark, whereby land is gained.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
dereliction

1590s, "abandonment" (formerly with a wider range than in modern use, such as of the sea withdrawing from the land), from Latin derelictionem (nominative derelictio), noun of action from past participle stem of derelinquere (see derelict). Meaning "failure in duty" is from c.1830.

Wiktionary
dereliction

n. 1 willful neglect of one's duty 2 the act of abandoning something, or the state of being abandoned

WordNet
dereliction
  1. n. a tendency to be negligent and uncaring; "he inherited his delinquency from his father"; "his derelictions were not really intended as crimes"; "his adolescent protest consisted of willful neglect of all his responsibilities" [syn: delinquency, willful neglect]

  2. willful negligence

Usage examples of "dereliction".

The bomb-sites have given way to the tower-blocks of the post-war dream and those in turn to the dereliction and disillusionment of monetarist dogma and I no longer need faith for now I have biology.

I expected, which meant I could go to Cheltenham races, held during the last of those weeks, without dereliction of duty.

If Niall had been prepared to blame her for dereliction, her stream of explanations and apologies had taken the first edge off his anger.

Ordinarily this lavatorial dereliction would have caught Captain Cullen's eye and vocabulary, but in the present his mind was filled with making westing, to the exclusion of all other things not contributory thereto.

It was in every respect a typical small American city, except that it was poor, with lots of boarded shopfronts and general dereliction, and that every person in every car, every pedestrian, every storekeeper, every fireman, every postman, every last soul was black.

Kirk chose his words with care, "a dereliction of our mission to break off the search and go see what thisthis anomaly is, don't you think?

The rate of desertion, suicide, and plain dereliction of duty defies all common sense.

Let any woman who is disquieted by reports of her husband's derelictions figure to herself how long it would have taken him to propose to her if left to his own enterprise, and then let her ask herself if so pusillanimous a creature could be imaged in the role of Don Giovanni.

I seated myself in a chair, and rocked to and fro, passing harsh judgment on my many derelictions of duty.

It was almost as if Bautista was going through the motions of government merely so that no one could accuse him of dereliction when his province vanished from the maps of the Spanish Empire.

In my opinion, that is the maximum I can do without finding myself in dereliction of my other responsibilities.

If he doesn't resign, he'll be court-martialed for cowardice and dereliction of duty and a dozen other things I can think of, besides being a first-class ass.

The town was barely three hours' ride away, so the dereliction was hardly serious, and Swynyard had been left with the strictest instructions that nothing was to be done without Faulconer's permission and that, if any emergency did arise, a messenger must be sent to Gordonsville immedi-ately.

She might have had difficulty with the notion that Worf was prepared to sacrifice her rather than allow dishonor and dereliction of duty to hold sway.

On the wall opposite a portrait of Mr Gladstone glared relentlessly down on this dereliction of the licensing laws.