---
title: resilience means to leap back
canonical_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/resilience-means-to-leap-back
markdown_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/resilience-means-to-leap-back.md
subtitle: "the word started as a jump, spent a century and a half with the engineers, and changed its question in 1973"
category: philosophy
---

# resilience means to leap back

*the word started as a jump, spent a century and a half with the engineers, and changed its question in 1973*

**What is resilience?** It is the capacity of a thing, a person or a place to take a shock and come through it. Engineers use it for a beam that springs back to shape. Ecologists use it for a living system that absorbs disturbance and stays itself. Planners and psychologists use it for recovery and adaptation. Same word, different questions.

Places had the thing long before anyone had the word. The floodplain spreads the flood. The marsh takes the edge off the surge. The canopy cools the street, and the forest holds the slope. They do that work whether or not anyone pays for it, for as long as they are left in a condition to. [**Ensurance**](/manual/ensurance?from=guide) is how the people who depend on them can pay for their keeping. It is not the floodplain, and it does not stop a storm.

This post is about the word: where it came from, and the year it changed its question. A root is a way into a word, not proof of anything. Latin does not tell a marsh what to do.

## the root: to leap back

*Resilience* comes from the Latin verb *resilire*, from *re-*, back or again, and *salire*, to leap. Wiktionary gives its senses as "to leap or spring back; rebound, recoil, retreat."

The Romans used it literally, and not always kindly. In Ovid, frogs leap back into cold pools and hail rebounds from a roof. In Cicero, an accusation bounces off the man it was aimed at. David Alexander, whose 2013 paper traces the word's history, notes that many of these uses were negative: "the rebounding was not a happy result, or the subject person recoiled."

### the leap in other english words

| word | the leap inside it | first known use in English |
|---|---|---|
| Salient | Latin *saliens*, leaping | 1646 |
| Assail | Latin *assilire*, to leap upon | 13th century |
| Desultory | Latin *desultorius*, of a circus rider who leaps from horse to horse | 1581 |
| Result | Latin *resultare*, to rebound | 15th century |
| Insult | Latin *insultare*, to spring upon | 1540 |
| Exult | Latin *exsultare*, to leap up | 1548 |

Paths and dates are Merriam-Webster's; the last three come through *saltare*, a verb built on *salire*. One word people often add is left out. *Salmon* is often said to mean "the leaper," but Wiktionary says that derivation "has been dismissed as folk etymology," and Merriam-Webster does not make the link.

## how the word travelled

| when | where it turns up | what it meant |
|---|---|---|
| Classical Latin | Ovid, Cicero, Livy, Pliny, Seneca the Elder | To leap back, rebound, recoil |
| 1529 | The verb *resile*, in the State Papers of Henry VIII | To go back on something |
| 1626–27 | Francis Bacon, *Sylva Sylvarum*, published after his death | The rebound of an echo |
| 1656 | Thomas Blount's *Glossographia*, the first known dictionary definition | To rebound; to go back on one's word |
| 1807 | Thomas Young, lectures on natural philosophy | A material's power to resist a blow |
| 1818 | Thomas Tredgold, on timber | Resisting "a body in motion" |
| 1856 | Robert Mallet, on artillery | The "modulus of resilience" of "other writers" |
| 1950s–1980s | Psychology, by way of anthropology | Doing well despite a hard start |
| 1973 | C. S. Holling, ecology | How much a living system can absorb and still persist |
| 2009, 2016 | United Nations disaster terms | A community's ability to resist, absorb and recover from a hazard |

Bacon was thinking about echoes. Strike a ball sidelong, he wrote, and it rebounds the other way: "Whether there be any such resilience in echoes ... may be tried." Alexander calls it the first known scientific use of the word in English. He dates it 1625, but Bacon died in 1626 and the book came out after his death; library copies are catalogued as 1626 and 1627.

Thomas Young defined it for mechanics in 1807: "The action which resists pressure is called strength, and that which resists impulse may properly be termed resilience." Alexander dates the first serious use in mechanics to Rankine in 1858, but Young and Tredgold came earlier. Merriam-Webster dates the shape-recovery sense of *resilience* to 1807; Bacon's echoes are older.

For the engineers, resilience became a quantity: first the energy a body takes before it breaks (Young), then the energy a material can take in and give back without being bent for good. Materials references still call that maximum the **modulus of resilience**. The question is how much it can take without permanent change, and it assumes one shape to come back to. For a beam, that is exactly right.

## 1973: the question changed

In 1973 the ecologist C. S. Holling published "Resilience and stability of ecological systems." He did not coin the word, and Alexander notes he "was by no means the first in his field" to use it. What he did was pull apart two ideas.

> "One can be termed stability, which represents the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium state after a temporary disturbance; the more rapidly it returns and the less it fluctuates, the more stable it would be. But there is another property, termed resilience, that is a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables."

The two can come apart: "a system can be very resilient and still fluctuate greatly." His example was the spruce budworm in the forests of eastern Canada, with six outbreaks since the early 1700s, highly unstable and still the same forest.

That is the turn. The engineers had asked how much a material can take and still spring back to its one shape. Ecologists had measured stability: **how fast a system comes back** to its equilibrium. Holling asked **how much can it take and still be itself**. That matters because a living system can have more than one state to settle into. Holling's paper walked through the Great Lakes, including the lake trout collapse in Lake Michigan and the eutrophication of Lake Erie. Pushed far enough, a lake may not simply return more slowly. It can become a different lake.

In 1996 Holling named the two views. The speed-of-return view, whose aims he described as "efficiency, constancy, and predictability," he named **engineering resilience**. The other, **ecological resilience**, measures "the magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before the system changes its structure." One is about "maintaining efficiency of function," the other about "maintaining existence of function." A definition followed in 2004, from Walker, Holling and colleagues: "Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks."

## the same word, different questions

Holling's is not the one true definition. Each field asks its own question with the word.

| field | the question | a definition in use |
|---|---|---|
| Materials | How much energy can it absorb and release without permanent change? | The modulus of resilience |
| Ecology | How much disturbance before it becomes a different system? | Walker and colleagues, 2004, above |
| Disaster policy | Can a community take a hazard and recover in time? | To "resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner" (United Nations, 2016) |
| Climate | Can linked systems cope and keep what they are? | To "maintain their essential function, identity and structure" (IPCC, 2022) |
| Psychology | How do people adapt to hard experiences? | See below |

Watch the policy definition grow. The UN's 2009 version asked a community to "resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover." The 2016 version added "adapt to, transform." The word keeps being asked to carry more.

## if you came here about yourself

Many people who type the question mean personal resilience, a field with its own history. Alexander dates the word's use in psychology to the 1950s, popular by the late 1980s, and credits much of it to Norman Garmezy's work with children. One example, Emmy Werner's study on Kauai, followed all the island's children born in 1955; her 1993 summary says protective factors enabled "most of these high-risk individuals to become competent and caring adults" by age 32. A one-in-three figure also circulates; the abstract itself says "most."

This guide is about places and gives no advice on personal resilience.

## a word stretched thin

Brand and Jax wrote in 2007 that "the original descriptive and ecological meaning of resilience is diluted as the term is used ambiguously and in a very wide extension." Alexander warned of "disillusionment if the term is pushed to represent more than it can deliver," and added: "One person's resilience may be another's vulnerability."

## which sense a place lives by

A place needs both questions. Its bridges, pumps and power lines should take their design load and come back to spec, and the engineers who design them are asking the right question for that work.

But much of what keeps a place itself through a flood, a fire or a dry decade is alive: the floodplain, the marsh, the canopy, the soil, the forest upstream. A living system may have no single shape to spring back to. Push one far enough and it may not come back slower. It can settle into something else, and where that edge lies is often hard to see in advance. Living systems have limits, and a record storm, flood or fire can exceed any buffer. So for the ground a place stands on, we use Holling's question: how much can it take and still be itself, and what keeps it that way?

The rest of this series follows that question, from what tips a living system over to why no place keeps it alone. Why paying for that capacity is not a donation is argued in [resilience is not a donation](/guide/resilience-is-not-a-donation?from=guide). If you came from finance, where "adaptation and resilience" is a budget category, see [adaptation and resilience are not the same ticket](/guide/adaptation-and-resilience-are-not-the-same-ticket?from=guide).

:::johnson
**resilience is not how fast a place bounces back. it is how much it can take and still be itself.**

A beam has one shape to return to. A floodplain, a marsh or a forest pushed past its limit can become something else, so the work is keeping it well back from that edge.

[read next: bounce back to what? →](/guide/bounce-back-to-what?from=guide)
:::

## where ensurance fits

**Ensurance** is our word for paying to keep a living system working before the loss, not after it. A place can hold an account in its own name, the ground it depends on can be named in a certificate, and proceeds go to the people doing the keeping. [Risk Resilience](/risk-resilience.ensurance?from=guide) is one of the flows the protocol tracks. Our own word has a history too: [the word is older than the industry](/guide/the-word-is-older-than-the-industry?from=guide). To see the living systems the protocol counts, start with [natural capital](/natural-capital?from=guide).

## frequently asked questions

### what is resilience?

The capacity to take a shock and come through it. Materials science asks how much energy something can absorb without permanent change; ecology, how much disturbance a system can take and stay the same system; disaster policy, whether a community can recover in time.

### what does resilience literally mean?

To leap back. It comes from the Latin *resilire*, from *re-*, back, and *salire*, to leap. Roman writers used it for frogs leaping back into water and hail rebounding from a roof.

### did c. s. holling coin the word resilience?

No. Francis Bacon used it for echoes in a book that appeared after his death in 1626, and Thomas Young defined it for materials in 1807. Holling's 1973 paper brought it to prominence in ecology with a distinct meaning: how much disturbance a system can absorb and still persist.

### what is the difference between stability and resilience?

In Holling's 1973 terms, stability is how quickly a system returns to equilibrium after a disturbance. Resilience is how much disturbance it can absorb and still keep the same relationships. A system can be highly resilient and still fluctuate a great deal.

## sources

[Wiktionary, *resilio*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/resilio) — From *re-* "again" and *saliō* "to leap"; "to leap or spring back; rebound, recoil, retreat"

[Wiktionary, *salio*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/salio) — Ancestry of *saliō* uncertain; *saltō* among its Latin derivatives

[Lewis & Short, *resilio* (alatius.com mirror)](https://alatius.com/ls/index.php?met=up&ord=resilio) — Ovid's frogs (*Met.* 6.374) and hail (*Met.* 12.480); Cicero, *Pro Roscio Amerino* 29.79

[Merriam-Webster, *resilience*](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resilience) — First known use 1807 in the physical sense; from *resilire*, base *salire*, "to leap"

[Merriam-Webster, *resile*](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resile) — First known use 1529

[Merriam-Webster entries for salient](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/salient), [assail](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/assail), [desultory](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/desultory), [result](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/result), [insult](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insult) and [exult](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exult) — Latin paths and first known uses in the cousins table

[Wiktionary, *salmo*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/salmo) — The derivation from *saliō* "has been dismissed as folk etymology"

[Alexander, D. E. (2013), "Resilience and disaster risk reduction: an etymological journey," *Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences* 13: 2707–2716](https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/13/2707/2013/nhess-13-2707-2013.pdf) — Classical uses; *resile* in 1529; Blount 1656; Rankine 1858; psychology; Holling "by no means the first"; the cautions quoted above

[Bacon, *Sylva Sylvarum*, experiment 245, in Spedding, Ellis and Heath (eds.), *The Works of Francis Bacon*, vol. II](https://archive.org/details/worksoffrancisba02bacoiala) — "Whether there be any such resilience in echoes"

[*Sylva Sylvarum*, 1627 edition](https://archive.org/details/McGillLibrary-osl_sylua-syluarum_WZ250B1283s1627-43895) and [1626 catalogue record](https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_sylva-sylvarum-or-a-natu_bacon-francis-viscount_1626) — "Published after the authors death"

[Young, T. (1807), *A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts*, vol. 1, Lecture XIII, p. 143](https://archive.org/details/lecturescourseof01younrich) — "That which resists impulse may properly be termed resilience"

[Tredgold, T. (1818), "On the transverse Strength and Resilience of Timber," *Philosophical Magazine* 51: 214–216](https://zenodo.org/record/1886498) — Larch against oak, "resisting a body in motion (called resilience)"

[Mallet, R. (1856), *On the Physical Conditions Involved in the Construction of Artillery*](https://archive.org/details/cu31924030759777) — The "modulus of resilience" of "other writers"

[Xometry, modulus of resilience](https://www.xometry.com/resources/materials/modulus-of-resilience/) — A material's capacity "to store and release energy" "without permanent deformation"

[Holling, C. S. (1973), "Resilience and stability of ecological systems," *Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics* 4: 1–23 (IIASA reprint)](https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/26/1/RP-73-003.pdf) — Stability and resilience defined; the spruce budworm; the Great Lakes; resilient yet fluctuating

[Holling, C. S. (1996), "Engineering Resilience versus Ecological Resilience," in *Engineering Within Ecological Constraints*, National Academy Press](https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/4919/chapter/4) — The two definitions named; efficiency and existence of function

[Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter and A. Kinzig (2004), "Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems," *Ecology and Society* 9(2): 5](https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5/) — The definition quoted above

[United Nations, A/71/644 (2016), report on indicators and terminology for disaster risk reduction](https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=A/71/644&l=en&t=pdf) — The 2016 definition, p. 22; the 2009 version as quoted by Alexander

[IPCC (2022), AR6 Working Group II, Annex II: Glossary](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_Annex-II.pdf) — Resilience, pp. 2919–2920

[Werner, E. E. (1993), "Risk, resilience, and recovery: Perspectives from the Kauai Longitudinal Study," *Development and Psychopathology* 5(4): 503–515 (abstract)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/development-and-psychopathology/article/abs/risk-resilience-and-recovery-perspectives-from-the-kauai-longitudinal-study/DC3C3F10587A1A7D04C0310270717B3E) — All children born in 1955 on the island, followed to age 32; "most" of the high-risk group became competent adults

[Brand, F. S. and K. Jax (2007), "Focusing the meaning(s) of resilience," *Ecology and Society* 12(1): 23](https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss1/art23/) — "Diluted as the term is used ambiguously"

## the series

1. [resilience means to leap back](/guide/resilience-means-to-leap-back?from=guide) — **Read first:** The word's root, its travels, and the question that changed in 1973
2. [bounce back to what?](/guide/bounce-back-to-what?from=guide) — A beam returns to its shape; a lake or a reef pushed too far becomes something else
3. [what makes a living system resilient](/guide/what-makes-a-living-system-resilient?from=guide) — Many kinds doing one job, spare capacity, connection and the slow things nobody watches
4. [the resilience a place already has is alive](/guide/the-resilience-a-place-already-has-is-alive?from=guide) — The floodplain, the marsh, the canopy and the soil as infrastructure
5. [how to build resilience for a place](/guide/how-to-build-resilience-for-a-place?from=guide) — Six steps, starting with the living systems a place already stands on
6. [no place is resilient alone](/guide/no-place-is-resilient-alone?from=guide) — Why the unit that works is the region, and every place in it