IMMOBILITY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does immobility mean? 

• IMMOBILITY (noun)
  The noun IMMOBILITY has 2 senses:

1. remaining in place

2. the quality of not moving

  Familiarity information: IMMOBILITY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• IMMOBILITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Remaining in place

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Synonyms:

fixedness; immobility; stationariness

Hypernyms ("immobility" is a kind of...):

lifelessness; motionlessness; stillness (a state of no motion or movement)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "immobility"):

rootage (fixedness by or as if by roots)

Derivation:

immobile (securely fixed in place)

Sense 2

Meaning:

The quality of not moving

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Hypernyms ("immobility" is a kind of...):

quality (an essential and distinguishing attribute of something or someone)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "immobility"):

immotility (lacking an ability to move)

inertness (immobility by virtue of being inert)

immovability; immovableness (not capable of being moved or rearranged)

Antonym:

mobility (the quality of moving freely)

 Context examples 

A rare mitochondrial myopathy characterized by a progressive limitation of eye movements, leading to immobility and eye drop.

(Kearns-Sayre Syndrome, NCI Thesaurus)

"What then, Die?" he replied, maintaining a marble immobility of feature.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

There was something ominous in his silence, his immobility.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

They strained to catch some interruption of the silence and immobility of nature.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

A subtype of schizophrenia characterized by a psychomotor disturbance that may involve motoric immobility, excessive motor activity, extreme negativism or mutism, peculiarities of voluntary movement, echolalia, and/or echopraxia.

(Catatonic Type Schizophrenia, NCI Thesaurus)

He had, when he so willed it, the utter immobility of countenance of a red Indian, and I could not gather from his appearance whether he was satisfied or not with the position of the case.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The cub was in a frenzy of terror, yet he lay without movement or sound, frozen, petrified into immobility, to all appearances dead.

(White Fang, by Jack London)