Word.ws English Dictionary

nonuse

UK/nɒnˈjuːs/

nonuse noun: the failure to make use of something.

Noun

nonuse (countable and uncountable, plural nonuses)

  1. The failure to make use of something.
    • Sacred values, and the taboos that protect them, can be attached to resources that we decide are genuinely precious, such as identifiable lives, national borders, and the nonuse of chemical and nuclear weapons.2011, Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Penguin, published 2012, page 771

Forms of nonuse

pluralnonuses
alternative formnon-use

Origin of nonuse

From non- + use.

Questions about nonuse

What does nonuse mean?
Nonuse means the failure to make use of something.
What part of speech is nonuse?
Nonuse is a noun.
How do you pronounce nonuse?
Nonuse is pronounced /nɒnˈjuːs/ (UK).
What is the plural of nonuse?
The plural of nonuse is nonuses.

Words near nonuse in the dictionary

  1. nonuropathogenic
  2. nonurothelial
  3. nonusable
  4. nonusage
  5. nonusance
  6. nonuse
  7. nonused
  8. nonuseful
  9. nonusefulness
  10. nonuser
  11. nonusers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nonuse (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: “nonuse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nonuse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.