MEANING
1. A state of extreme physical or emotional exhaustion that leaves someone unable to act normally.
2. The act or posture of lying face down, especially as a gesture of respect, worship, or submission.
3. An extreme yielding of independence or dignity before another person or power.
Use it for
describing exhaustion beyond ordinary tiredness; showing a character temporarily unable to act; distinguishing collapse from deliberate submissionDistinguishes bodily collapse, deliberate face-down posture, and figurative submission rather than merging them as weakness. Writing functions: Body Language / Exhaustion.
Words that belong together
- complete prostration
- nervous prostration
- a state of prostration
On the page
After the vigil, she passed from agitation into a prostration that even sleep did not immediately ease.
His apparent indifference was prostration; he no longer had the strength to argue.
The account records a prostration before the sealed shrine.
He mistook the deliberate prostration for a collapse until the figure rose again.
The narrator regards their praise as prostration before the patron’s wealth.
Word forms
- Base
- prostration
Usage notes
Countable for acts of lying face down, generally uncountable for exhaustion or abject submission. Plural prostrations. Register: formal. Commonness: uncommon in everyday speech; established in formal and literary writing (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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