Word.ws English Dictionary

preoccupied

preoccupied adjective: concerned with something else; distracted; giving one's attention elsewhere. Also the simple past and past participle of preoccupy.

Adjective

preoccupied (comparative more preoccupied, superlative most preoccupied)

  1. Concerned with something else; distracted; giving one's attention elsewhere.
    • I was preoccupied with a deadline at work, and I forgot his birthday.
  2. (archaic) Already occupied.
    • Terrified at this uproar, which disconcerted the magician himself, she ran for shelter into the place which was preoccupied by the other lady […].1751, Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
    • Scythrop, retiring to his tower, found his study preoccupied.1818, Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey, section X
  3. (obsolete) Prepossessed; biased.
  4. (not comparable) Describing a taxonomic name not available for use because it is already used for another.
    • In 1924 J. D. Tothill revised the nearctic species in the genus Fabriciella, a name proposed by Bezzi in 1906 to replace Fabricia Rob. D. which is preoccupied.1931, John Allen Rowe, “A revision of the males of the nearctic species in the genus Fabriciella (Tachinidae)”, in Annals of the Entomological Society of America, volume 24

Also used as

preoccupied is also the simple past and past participle of preoccupy.

preoccupied meaning in Malay

preoccupied in Malay

concerned with something else, distracted
leka

Examples of preoccupied in a sentence

  • The Prime Minister was preoccupied with nonbudgetary concerns such as the war.
  • We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.
  • We live in an opulent blandness—overfed, overtended, overentertained, and overly preoccupied with ourselves.

All 20 example sentences with preoccupied

Forms of preoccupied

comparativemore preoccupied
superlativemost preoccupied

Words formed from preoccupied

Phrases with preoccupied

Questions about preoccupied

What does preoccupied mean?
Preoccupied means concerned with something else; distracted; giving one's attention elsewhere.
What is preoccupied in Malay?
Preoccupied in Malay is leka. See Preoccupied meaning in Malay.
What part of speech is preoccupied?
Preoccupied is an adjective.

Words near preoccupied in the dictionary

  1. preoccupates
  2. preoccupating
  3. preoccupation
  4. preoccupational
  5. preoccupations
  6. preoccupied
  7. preoccupied name
  8. preoccupied names
  9. preoccupiedly
  10. preoccupiedness
  11. preoccupier

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: preoccupied (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-preoccupied.ogg.

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