Word.ws English Dictionary

never events

never events is the plural of never event.

Meaning of never event

Noun

never event (plural never events)

  1. A bad event that should never occur.
    • The safety systems engineer examined records of never events across several industries, including health care, air traffic control, and nuclear power.
    1. A serious adverse medical event that should never occur and thus is, by strict definitions of preventability, always preventable, being unambiguous, clearly identifiable and measurable, and resulting in death or significant disability.
      • Wrong-site surgery is a never event because it is always preventable when adequate double checks and crosschecks are enforced.
    2. A particularly shocking preventable medical error that should never occur.
      • Kernicterus has been called a “never event,” identified on a list of “serious, egregious, preventable adverse events” by The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality […]2003, Laura Davidson, Elizabeth H. Thilo, “How to make kernicterus a "never event"”, in NeoReviews, volume 4, number 11, American Academy of Pediatrics, →DOI, pages e308–e314

Questions about never events

What is never events the plural of?
Never events is the plural of never event.

Words near never events in the dictionary

  1. never eat soggy Weet-Bix
  2. never eat soggy wheat
  3. never ending
  4. Never Ending September
  5. never event
  6. never events
  7. never ever
  8. never ever have I
  9. never fear
  10. never fight a land war in Asia
  11. never have I ever

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: never events (page history and authors); never event (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: “never events.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/never_events. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.