Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

averse

UK/əˈvɜː(ɹ)s/
adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #11,938 of 15,258neutralformal · an editor’s judgement

Averse means strongly disinclined towards something. You would rather not, and you feel it.

It always takes to and it always follows the verb, so being averse to change rather than an averse person. It appears constantly in the negative, since not averse to a drink is a very British way of saying yes enthusiastically. Risk-averse is now a standard compound in business. The trap is adverse, which means unfavourable, and adverse weather and averse to weather mean quite different things.

Definitions of averse

  1. 1adjectiveaverseStrongly disinclined towards something.C1

    “He is not averse to a bit of publicity.”

Where it comes from

Averse is the participle of avert. Latin aversus means turned away, from āvertō, so somebody averse to a thing has already turned from it.

  1. Latin

    aversus

  2. English, today

    averse

Built from

  • averto · Latin — to avert

From Latin aversus, past participle of averto (“to avert”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 36 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

averse in the wild

  • In the developing world impoverished people who might not be averse to eating meat are unable to because meat can be a luxury.

    Economic vegetarianism

  • For variance-based discrimination to occur, the decision maker needs to be risk averse; such a decision maker will prefer the group with the lower variance.

    Statistical discrimination (economics)

  • Each risk-averse investor is assumed to maximize the expected value of an increasing, concave von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function.

    Marginal conditional stochastic dominance

  • Margin of Safety: Risk-averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor is a 1991 book written by American investor Seth Klarman, manager of the Baupost Group hedge fund.

    Margin of Safety (book)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the averto family

avertaverse

averse — used about once every 11,558 pages · #11,938 · point at the bar for the others