It’s “resilience,” not “resiliency.”
Because verbosity is pretentious.
Resilience is a noun. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it thus:
The quality or fact of being able to recover quickly or easily from, or resist being affected by, a misfortune, shock, illness, etc.; robustness; adaptability.
Its first recorded use was in 1626, by Sir Francis Bacon in his Sylva sylvarum; or, A naturall historie. Its modern, figurative meaning was first recorded in 1857 by J. F. Smith & W. Howitt in Volume 1 of Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, describing the vigor of the Scots in response to England’s “ponderous” power.
Resiliency is also a noun. Its definition, also from the OED:
Capacity to recover from misfortune, shock, illness, etc.; = resilience.
Its first recorded use was in 1651, in J. A. Comenius’ Natural Philosophy Reformed. In 1839, R. Bell’s Eminent Literary & Scientific Men used the word in its modern, figurative meaning to describe the spirit of a certain Mr. Temple.
The two nouns mean the same thing — they’re exact synonyms. Resilience was coined first and is considered the etymon (a word from which a later word is derived) of resiliency, while resiliency was used first with the modern meaning that we all know and love.
Which one, then, to use?
When the issue arose for NEMAC, my colleague Ian Johnson and I did a little etymological digging (resulting in the OED definitions and usage, above). We also learned that, according to Grammarist, resilience is far more common than resiliency. In North American publications, resilience appears about four times as often as resiliency, and resiliency appears only rarely outside North America.
Ian also points out that the suffix -cy is used for abstract nouns, whereas resiliens is the present participle of resilire (Latin: to rebound, recoil), which translates into a non-abstract meaning: the act of rebounding. The abstract -cy can be read, then, as the tendency to rebound. Building resiliency might improve your tendency—or inclination—to rebound, while building resilience would improve the actual performance of rebounding. Obviously, both are good, and the general difference lies in the “potential vs. kinetic” action of rebounding. And, as we all know, you should always chose the action word.
In deciding which one we’d use at NEMAC, I went with my gut: we use “resilience” and recommend that our clients and partners do the same.
My little secret, though, is that my gut was highly influenced by this answer to the resilience/resiliency question posted by user21497 on the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange:
I would always use resilience because it’s one syllable shorter than resiliency. … It doesn’t matter because they are…exact synonyms, except for the pretentiousness of the longer word: resiliency. All verbosity is pretentious.
Cheers, user21497! Because all verbosity IS pretentious.
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- Much respect and mad props to my friend and colleague Ian Johnson, who is always eager and willing to jump down these research rabbit holes with me.
