disuse
Americannoun
verb (used with object)
noun
Etymology
Origin of disuse
Explanation
Use the noun disuse to describe a condition of not being used. After years of disuse, you won't be surprised when your dad's motorcycle doesn't start. The word disuse implies at least a bit of neglect, and it can also mean that something has become obsolete or old-fashioned: "Typewriters fell into disuse after personal computers became available." You'll often find the word used in the graceful phrase "fall into disuse." The word comes from a Latin root, dis, which means "lack of," added to the word use, and it's been around since about 1400.
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.
See Examples For:
After a brief resurgence during the Civil War, when it was used as a military route, the road fell into disuse.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 24, 2026
Since its closure along with the rail works in 1986, it fell into disuse and disrepair.
From BBC ● Aug. 24, 2024
Its back room, once a gathering place for the miners and their families who populated the town a generation ago, has been locked up for many years, fallen to disuse.
From New York Times ● Apr. 4, 2024
This is why the Spanish, who arrived in the 1500s and set out to control the people by converting them to Catholicism, banned the cultivation and possession of the crop, which fell into disuse.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 25, 2024
The doorway to the stairs was on the second floor at the end of a long hallway in the vacant western wing, the door itself narrower than the rest and the knob rusted from disuse.
From "Ophie's Ghosts" by Justina Ireland
On an adjacent island facing Setouchi are small disused bases that launched shinyo suicide motorboat attacks on Allied forces in World War II.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 3, 2026
They also came after Israel bombed the disused Abu Duhur airbase in the country's northwest earlier in the week, claiming it wanted to avert Turkish troops deploying to the facility.
From Barron's ● Aug. 23, 2026
In dirty t-shirts and flimsy sandals, hundreds of unaccompanied minors slept outdoors in a disused industrial park in Ceuta after swimming to the Spanish territory from Morocco, AFP saw Saturday.
From Barron's ● Aug. 1, 2026
Ries, the bankruptcy trustee, said offices in Texas were disused and decrepit—his foot went through the floor when he visited one location around two months after McClain’s death.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 7, 2026
An immense chimney, relic of a disused mill, reared up, shadowy and ominous.
From "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" by J.K. Rowling
But how this can be avoided entirely, I know not, but by disusing their goods and letting them perish in their hands.
From Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams During the Revolution with a Memoir of Mrs. Adams by Abigail Adams
But no mere sentimental or capricious dislike to the pig, on the part of any number of persons, could now procure an enactment for disusing that animal.
From Moral Science; a Compendium of Ethics by Alexander Bain
From an internal desire on the part of the creature disusing it, to be quit of an organ which it finds troublesome.
From Life and Habit by R. A. (Richard Alexander) Streatfeild
The practice still continued in England of disusing tillage and throwing the land into enclosures, for the sake of pasture.
From The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. From Elizabeth to James I. by David Hume
And finally, it is now near two hundred years since the Society of Quakers denied the authority of the rite altogether, and gave good reasons for disusing it.
From Transcendentalism in New England A History by Octavius Brooks Frothingham
Random Word
Spin the wheel and learn a new word!
Get a wordDefinitions 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.
