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unemployment

UK/ʌn.ɪmˈplɔɪ.mənt/US/ʌn.ɪmˈplɔɪ.mənt/
nounB1+Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,714 of 15,258leans written

Unemployment is the state of having no paid work. Rising unemployment, unemployment benefit, the unemployment rate.

The rate counts only people who are out of work and looking for it, so anybody who has given up looking disappears from the figure, and that is the standing criticism of it. Some unemployment always exists, since people move between jobs.

Definitions of unemployment

  1. 1noununemploymentThe state of having no paid work, and how widespread it is.B1+

    “When the mine closed, unemployment in the town rose sharply.”

unemployment is a state.

Where it comes from

  1. Middle French

    employer

  2. English

    employment

  3. English, today

    unemployment

Built from

  • plicō · Latin — fold

From un- + employment. employment comes from employ (itself from Middle French employer, from Middle French empleier, from Latin implicō (“enfold, involve, be connected with”), itself from in- + plicō (“fold”)) ment.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

unemployment in the wild

  • At 5.9%, Malta had the sixth-lowest unemployment rate in the EU in 2015.

    Economy of Malta

  • The NAIRU has also been described by Milton Friedman, among others, as the "natural" rate of unemployment.

    Full employment

  • Dickens found that full-employment unemployment rate varied a lot over time but equaled about 5.5 percent of the civilian labor force during the 2000s.

    Full employment

  • The employment-to-population ratio or employment rate is distinct from the unemployment rate.

    List of countries by unemployment rate

  • Graduate unemployment, or educated unemployment, is unemployment among people with an academic degree.

    Graduate unemployment

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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 plicō family

simple

unemployment — used about once every 1,054 pages · #4,714 · point at the bar for the others