impuissance

1. 1.

   powerlessness revealed by an inability to act

   “in spite of their weakness the group remains active”

   Synonymshelplessnessweakness

   Broaderpowerlessness

Other forms of impuissance

plural

impuissances·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about impuissance

What does impuissance mean?

impuissance means "powerlessness revealed by an inability to act".

How many syllables are in impuissance?

impuissance has 4 syllables: im-pu-is-sance. The stress falls on "pu".

What is another word for impuissance?

Close synonyms include helplessness, weakness. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is impuissance a common word?

impuissance is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.