malinger
To feign illness, injury, or incapacitation in order to avoid work, obligation, or perilous risk.
Verb
- To feign illness, injury, or incapacitation in order to avoid work, obligation, or perilous risk.
- It is not uncommon on exam days for several students to malinger rather than prepare themselves.
- And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! / Smoothed by long fingers, / Asleep … tired … or it malingers, / Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. - 1915 June, T[homas] S[tearns] Eliot, “The Love...
- It has been the impression of past investigators that persons who malinger psychosis have latent tendencies for the condition. - 1984, The Psychiatric Quarterly, volume 56:
- To self-inflict real injury or infection (to inflict self-harm) in order to avoid work, obligation, or perilous risk.
Origin
From French malingrer, from adjective malingre (“delicate, fragile”).
Forms
Related
factitious disorder differentiated from malingering by a component of real mental illness as opposed to solely a sane calculation of shirking to call out someone for or accuse someone of either factitious pretense malingering