Resilience

How to spell resilience

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce resilience

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does resilience mean?

1. nounThe capacity to recover quickly from difficulty, or the ability of a material to spring back into shape.

Resilience in a sentence

• The team showed remarkable resilience after losing two major clients.

• Financial resilience comes from keeping several months of savings in reserve.

Where does resilience come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb resilire, meaning 'to leap back' or 'to rebound', which was built from re- 'back' and salire 'to leap or jump'. The same salire root sits inside a surprising family of everyday words, including 'salient' (something that leaps out at you) and even 'sally' and 'somersault'. English took up the noun resilience in the 1600s, at first in a fairly literal, physical sense describing how a material springs back to its original shape after being bent or stretched. From there the meaning broadened to the figurative one we lean on today: the capacity of a person, system, or community to recover quickly from hardship. The spelling trap lives in the unstressed middle and end: the soft 'c' before -ence, and the single 'l' and single 's' where writers often want to double a letter.

How the word is built

• re- (back)
• sil- (from salire: to leap, jump)
• -ence (noun-forming suffix)