willful neglect

1. 1.

   a tendency to be negligent and uncaring

   “he inherited his delinquency from his father”

   “his derelictions were not really intended as crimes”

   “his adolescent protest consisted of willful neglect of all his responsibilities”

   Synonymsdelinquencydereliction

   Broadernegligence

Questions about willful neglect

What does willful neglect mean?

willful neglect means "a tendency to be negligent and uncaring".

What is another word for willful neglect?

Close synonyms include delinquency, dereliction. 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 willful neglect a common word?

willful neglect 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.