avoid something like the plague

avoid | American Dictionary

avoid
verb[ T ]
us/əˈvɔɪd/
to stay away from someone or something, or prevent something from happening, or not allow yourself to do something:
Do you think Robert is avoiding me? I haven’t seen him for a month.
I try to avoid going shopping on Saturdays because the stores are so crowded.
If you want to lose weight, avoid eating between meals.

avoidance

noun[ U ]us/əˈvɔɪ·dəns/
The avoidance of injury is more important than winning a game.

avoid | Business English

avoid
verb[ T ]
uk /əˈvɔɪd/us
to try to prevent something bad from happening:
A spokeswoman for the company said it was hoping to avoid industrial action.
Understanding differing viewpoints is a good start toward avoiding conflict in the workplace.
to try not to do something, or to try to stay away from something:
The government avoided the mistakes they made in the past.
avoid doing sthCredit cards can be a source of free credit if you can organize payments within the stipulated time limits, so as to avoid paying interest.

Examples of avoid

avoid
Excessive lettering should be avoided on the figure and should be inserted in the legend.
The next section introduces another device called a lexical entry automaton, which is an elaborated form of trunks, for avoiding the computability problem.
At this stage, acknowledgements, self-references and other forms of self-identification should be avoided.
To estimate a smooth function, while avoiding overfitting the data, we can impose a smoothing penalty.
In fact, in both pragmatics and sociolinguistics more generally, the term "ritual" is usually avoided.
The synonyms file provides more specific information so that the generation of certain irrelevant concepts can be avoided.
Many of the workgroups struggled with the challenge of keeping the coding ' general purpose ' and avoiding theory-specific feature tags.
The discussion was not always easy to control but, in order to move ahead with the work, this couldn't be avoided.
The sound material cannot then be avoided, being the voice of the processes of nature.
Spatial separation is one of these guidelines (in addition to avoiding frequency masking and maintaining some temporal-textural difference between simultaneous sounds).
The status of arrangement today, however, is quite different; in new music, arrangement is mostly avoided and perceived as unfashionable.
Computing interferences are avoided by imposing structural constraints under the form of simple rules.
Both the individual and the community approach were above all driven by the aim of avoiding this major risk.
As with the universal property, the primary application of the fusion property is as a proof principle that avoids the need for inductive proofs.
In most respects the two approaches (parsimony or avoiding a possible omitted variable problem) trade off.
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These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.