negligible

UK/ˈnɛɡlɪd͡ʒɪbəl/US/ˈnɛɡlɪd͡ʒɪbəl/

adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,335 of 15,258leans writtenformal · an editor’s judgement

Negligible means so small that it can safely be ignored. Technically there, practically nothing.

The word belongs to measurement and money: a negligible amount, a negligible risk, a negligible effect. It is a judgement rather than a quantity, since what counts as negligible depends on what you are doing. Do not confuse it with negligent, which means carelessly failing in a duty and is a serious accusation. Both come from neglect, but only one of them is an insult.

Definitions of negligible

1adjectivenegligibleToo small or unimportant to be worth considering.C1
“The difference in cost was negligible.”

Where it comes from

Proto-Indo-European
*leǵ-
Latin
neglegō — to neglect
New Latin
*negligibilis
English, today
negligible

Built from

-ibilis · Latin — -ible

From negligence/negligent + -ible, as if from New Latin negligibilis, from Latin neglegō (“to neglect”) + -ibilis (“-ible”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Academic English, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 6 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

negligible in the wild

In mathematics, the term "almost all" means "all but a negligible quantity".
Almost all
The meaning of "negligible" depends on the mathematical context; for instance, it can mean finite, countable, or null.
Almost all
However, the residual entropy is often quite negligible and can be accounted for when it occurs using statistical mechanics.
Standard molar entropy
In mathematics, a negligible set is a set that is small enough that it can be ignored for some purpose.
Negligible set
For some purposes, we also need this ideal to be a sigma-ideal, so that countable unions of negligible sets are also negligible.
Negligible set

1 / 2

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 neglegō family

neglect negligible neglectful

negligible — used about once every 8,568 pages · #11,335 · point at the bar for the others

← Vocabulary