Word.ws English Dictionary

malingering

malingering noun: the intentional feigning of an illness or injury for personal gain or to avoid a responsibility, such as work, military service, or legal consequences. Also the present participle and gerund of malinger.

Noun

malingering (countable and uncountable, plural malingerings)

  1. The intentional feigning of an illness or injury for personal gain or to avoid a responsibility, such as work, military service, or legal consequences.
    • Owners also restricted access to medical care by routinely accusing sick blacks of malingering. Slave narratives and planters’ records reveal that an owner faced with a sick slave was likely to believe the illness was feigned.2008, Harriet A. Washington, “Southern Discomfort”, in Medical Apartheid, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, page 45

Also used as

malingering is also the present participle and gerund of malinger.

Forms of malingering

pluralmalingerings

Questions about malingering

What does malingering mean?
Malingering means the intentional feigning of an illness or injury for personal gain or to avoid a responsibility, such as work, military service, or legal consequences.
What part of speech is malingering?
Malingering is a noun.
What is the plural of malingering?
The plural of malingering is malingerings.

Words near malingering in the dictionary

  1. Malingao
  2. malinger
  3. malingered
  4. malingerer
  5. malingerers
  6. malingering
  7. malingerings
  8. malingeror
  9. malingerors
  10. malingers
  11. malingery

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: malingering (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.

Last updated:

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