Word.ws English Dictionary

Great Resignation

Great Resignation proper noun: an economic trend from 2021 to 2023 in which many employees voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse and job-hopping was common.

Proper noun

the Great Resignation

  1. An economic trend from 2021 to 2023 in which many employees voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse and job-hopping was common.
    • On the other hand, the Great Resignation — the emergence of what look like labor shortages even though employment is still five million below its prepandemic level, and even further below its previous trend — remains somewhat mysterious.2021 November 5, Paul Krugman, “Wonking Out: Is the Great Resignation a Great Rethink?”, in New York Times (subscriber-only newsletter)
    • In fact, accommodation and food services, which has been hardest hit by the Great Resignation, has also created one out of every three net new jobs in 2021. Does that make any sense? Only if you think about this as a job-switching revolution.2021 December 8, Derek Thompson, “Three Myths of the Great Resignation”, in The Atlantic

Examples of Great Resignation in a sentence

  • There certainly is a ‘great resignation’ but we don't know if people are throwing in the towel because they are burnt out or because they are proactively taking charge.2022 August 20, John Perry, quotee, “The great resignation: A lifestyle choice or an effect of burnout?”, in The Irish Times, Dublin, page...
  • His [Ranjay Gulati’s] research on how companies energize employees is even more vital during this era of the so-called Great Resignation.2022 December 4, Shirley Leung, “Great Resignation? No, it's the ‘Great Rethink’”, in Boston Globe, page R29:
  • The job-hopping days of the Covid-19 era, dubbed the Great Resignation, have given way to the so-called “low hire, low fire” economy.2025 November 17, Michael Sasso, “The Job Market Is Heating Up — for Jobs That People Usually Don't Want. Applications are up and turnover...

Synonyms of Great Resignation

Origin of Great Resignation

Coined by professor of management Anthony Klotz in May 2021. Its coining was influenced by the precedent of Great Recession (which was modeled after Great Depression).

Questions about Great Resignation

What does Great Resignation mean?
Great Resignation means an economic trend from 2021 to 2023 in which many employees voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse and job-hopping was common.
How do you use Great Resignation in a sentence?
There certainly is a ‘great resignation’ but we don't know if people are throwing in the towel because they are burnt out or because they are proactively taking charge.
What part of speech is Great Resignation?
Great Resignation is a proper noun.

Words near Great Resignation in the dictionary

  1. great reed warblers
  2. great replacement
  3. great replacement theory
  4. great reset
  5. Great Reshuffle
  6. Great Resignation
  7. great rhododendron
  8. great rhododendrons
  9. great rhombicuboctahedra
  10. great rhombicuboctahedron
  11. great rhombicuboctahedrons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Great Resignation (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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