Word.ws English Dictionary

countercyclical

countercyclical adjective: dampening the cyclical fluctuations due to the business cycle in an economy.

Adjective

countercyclical (comparative more countercyclical, superlative most countercyclical)

  1. (public policy) Dampening the cyclical fluctuations due to the business cycle in an economy.
  2. Moving in the direction opposite to that of the overall state of an economy.
    • The unemployment rate is countercyclical in the sense that it rises when economic growth is low and vice versa.

Antonyms of countercyclical

Forms of countercyclical

comparativemore countercyclical
superlativemost countercyclical

Origin of countercyclical

From counter- + cyclical.

Words formed from countercyclical

Questions about countercyclical

What does countercyclical mean?
Countercyclical means dampening the cyclical fluctuations due to the business cycle in an economy.
What part of speech is countercyclical?
Countercyclical is an adjective.

Words near countercyclical in the dictionary

  1. countercurse
  2. countercurses
  3. countercurve
  4. countercurves
  5. countercyclic
  6. countercyclical
  7. countercyclicality
  8. countercyclically
  9. countercyclicity
  10. counterdance
  11. counterdances

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: countercyclical (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “countercyclical.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/countercyclical. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.