great resignation
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.01 in modern English
18
Scrabble Score
16
Letters
4
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
An economic trend from 2021 to 2023 in which many employees voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse and job-hopping was common.
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "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."
- "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. The truth is it's probably a mix of both. There are positive resignations and negative ones."
- "His [Ranjay Gulati’s] research on how companies energize employees is even more vital during this era of the so-called Great Resignation."
- "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. However, a recent rash of layoff announcements suggest companies have lost their fear of firing. While overall the jobless rate remained fairly low at 4.3% in August — the latest data available — those out of work are lingering in unemployment for longer. Almost 26% of unemployed workers that month had been out of work for more than half a year, one of the highest shares in a decade, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
Etymology
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).
Inflected Forms
the Great Resignation (canonical)