Find the word definition

Crossword clues for inaction

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
inaction
noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Continued pollution of the lake shows the state government's inaction.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ In this case, inaction is bad news for wage earners.
▪ It induces nausea and thereby inaction, since nothing can be done to affect the essential condition: action requires illusion.
▪ Satellite television stations under the control of press barons and modelled on the tabloid press may make inaction even more indefensible.
▪ Such inaction provides an ideal foil which leaves their assumed image of heterosexuality intact.
▪ The forfeiture of self-created lobbies is perhaps the major reason for political inaction.
▪ The Treasury postpones a key sale of notes, citing Congressional inaction on lifting the debt limit.
▪ They waited there, in Berwick, in a strange state of enforced inaction and suspense.
▪ Whatever the cause, the inaction that results is costly.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Inaction

Inaction \In*ac"tion\, n. [Pref. in. not + action: cf. inaction.] Lack of action or activity; forbearance from labor; idleness; rest; inertness.
--Berkeley.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
inaction

1707, from in- (1) "not, opposite of" + action.

Wiktionary
inaction

n. Want of action or activity; forbearance from labor; idleness; rest; inertness.

WordNet
inaction
  1. n. the state of being inactive [syn: inactivity, inactiveness] [ant: action, action, action]

  2. a state of no activity [syn: inactiveness]

Usage examples of "inaction".

Sixte aurait le temps de changer de tenue avant de paraitre devant son general, qui, furieux contre les autres autant que contre lui-meme de son inaction forcee, ne permettait pas la plus petite tache de boue, ou le moindre grain de poussiere.

As to the arrest of John Mitton, the valet, it was a council of despair as an alternative to absolute inaction.

One perk of being a tugger was that no expense was spared to make life bearable during the long months of boredom and inaction for the two men, or in this case man and woman, aboard.

I have been thinking over his wrongous confinement, and my debt, till I can endure my inaction no longer, and I swear by St.

My limbs were torpid and benumbed from inaction in the water and by the exposure of my hands and arms to the cold night air.

Molt were tele porting to a point nearby, but he was too keyed up to accept the stress of inaction.

When taken by healthy provers in varying quantities to test its toxic effects the plant has caused distension of the whole abdomen, especially on the right side, with tenderness on pressure over the liver, and with a deficiency of bile in hard knotty stools, the colouring matter of the faeces being found by chemical tests present in the urine: so that a preparation of this Thistle modified in strength, and considerably diluted in its doses proves truly homoeopathic to simple obstructive jaundice through inaction of the liver, and readily cures the disorder.

Ptolemy, the inaction and traditionalism of the Arabs, and the elaborate falsities of story tellers, who, in the absence of real knowledge, had a grand opening for terrible fairy tales.

Jack Oliver was one who did not let his biceps rust in inaction, but thrashed everybody on the Island whom he thought needed it, and his ideas as to those who should be included in this class widened daily, until it began to appear that he would soon feel it his duty to let no unwhipped man escape, but pound everybody on the Island.

Our priests are not imbecile Trappists and Carthusians, to be reduced to inaction and silence.

Perhaps a dozen more such lines as the following would reduce the most irritable of critics to a state of inaction.

This idea in connection with the cartel of defiance can therefore no longer be made use of in order by such rhodomontade to qualify the inaction of him whose part it is to advance, that is, the offensive.

Frustrated by his own inaction, Jack was asking one of the barmen what he could do to help.

A young man of inaction, who tried to murder his father by means of long poems in school copybooks and referred to his mother as the cook.

Rains, and the knights are bored out of their minds from inaction and drunk or wenching most of the time, and there is no one left to serve me but cravens and fools and traitorous tricksters plotting to take my kingdom once the Ruwendian demon-trulls have finished me off!