activity

Thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms, and examples

the fact of not doing something you should
failureFailure to follow the employee guidelines can lead to your immediate termination.
defaultThe bank seized his house because his mortgage was in default.
malpracticeThe surgeon was sued for malpractice.
derelictionHe was dishonourably discharged for dereliction of duty.
neglectCorruption and neglect resulted in a government that was weakened enough to be overthrown.
negligenceEducational standards deteriorated thanks to the negligence of the administration.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Passive and not working
adynamic
anywhere
breather
breathing space
bum
bum around
idle
laze
leave someone beidiom
lie around
moribund
navel
non-physical
recharge
siesta
sit on your handsidiom
sit round
slob
slob around (something)
slop around (something)

inaction | American Dictionary

inaction
noun[ U ]
us/ɪnˈæk·ʃən/
failure to do anything that might provide a solution to a problem:
The mayor was criticized for his inaction on problems affecting the city’s poor.

Examples of inaction

inaction
His view that social change depends on a spontaneous transformation of the individual is dismissed as a premise for collective inaction.
Another's action, or inaction, can be monitored for its possible implications for one's own possible action, and for the direction work should take.
The realization of knowledge led to ultimate freedom and its path of renunciation was critiqued as one leading to inaction.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial officials reversed their inaction and began to seriously consider options for drainage.
People's lives will be affected for good or ill by one's actions or inactions, and this can never be forgotten.
Rather than face the repercussions of enforcing unpopular laws on them, they usually preferred to risk severe penalties for inaction and non-reporting.
External pressures may lead societal actors to demand change, but more important, they prompt some officials to believe that inaction might worsen the original problem.
In this spontaneous mass reaction thesis, the state's inaction during the violence gets condoned.
Three policy decisions (or "nondecisions," since government inaction may be as consequential as government action) were particularly crucial in shaping subsequent political struggles.
No single reason for collective inaction can be pin-pointed.
The rapid proliferation of kleptocracies around the world has shed new light on the issue and on the perils of inaction.
Some cases of harassment were one-off incidents, but others were repeated or protracted actions or inaction.
It could ' banish inaction', they asserted, in idle young men.
The nobles, he charges further, have been complicit with this evil by their inaction.
But there were other areas of state policy where the political excuses for inaction or confusion were less compelling.
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.