restlessness
Americannoun
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the inability to remain still or at rest, or a mood characterized by this.
To overcome younger students’ restlessness and anxiety, one expert suggests class routines, role play activities, and other calming exercises.
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the fact of being unable to sleep or find a comfortable position in which to sleep.
I haven't been sleeping so well lately—a mix of restlessness and staying up too late watching movies.
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discontent or dissatisfaction that drives one to keep looking for solutions, alternatives, or new things.
We are incomplete beings yearning to be made whole, dogged by a sense of unease and restlessness.
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perpetual movement.
Growing up on the coast of Sydney as he did, his music is influenced by the restlessness of the ocean.
Etymology
Origin of restlessness
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
He's an unlikely music sensation, whose rootsy songs of restlessness and belonging captured TikTok's Gen Z romantics.
From BBC • Apr. 25, 2026
By filtering such a common feeling through a strange and delightfully unsettling narrative lens, “By Design” contends with our modern restlessness in far more memorable fashion than many big-budget, big-idea films of the last year.
From Salon • Feb. 18, 2026
Each configuration seems contingent, not fixed, as if in a process of perpetual transition driven by some invisible force—tectonic restlessness or a growth hormone, say.
From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 13, 2025
His restlessness, be it musical, culinary or otherwise cultural, took him to San Francisco and New York.
From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 10, 2025
My restlessness with Mason—and for the first time in my life a restlessness with being around white people—began as soon as I got back home and entered eighth grade.
From "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" by Alex Malcolm X;Hailey
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
