liability
Pluralliabilities
- 1A debt, obligation, or responsibility owed to another person or party.
The airline denied any liability for the passengers' lost luggage.
The pension fund's liabilities to its retirees grow larger every year.
Similarresponsibility, obligation, debt
Note
The word is liable turned into a noun with -ity, and it behaves differently counted and uncounted. Used without an article, it is legal responsibility that can be admitted or denied: in W. W. Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw (1901), the firm of Maw and Meggins "admit no liability at all" yet still pay compensation. As a count noun, liabilities are particular debts, the kind carried on a pension fund's books.
- 2A drawback or handicap that holds something back, a burden on whoever must care for it, or a person or action that exposes others to greater risk.
As the scandal grew, the adviser became a political liability to the senator.
Her old car had become a liability, breaking down every time she drove it far from home.
Similarburden, drawback, handicap, hindrance
Oppositeasset
Note
Everyday speech uses the bookkeeper's pair here too: a person or a thing is weighed as an asset or a liability, by whether it helps or costs. The cost always lands on someone, which is why the word takes to: in 2016 the question asked of Huma Abedin was whether she would become a liability to Hillary Clinton.
- 3In accounting, any item recorded on the right-hand side of a balance sheet.
Unpaid supplier invoices are recorded as a current liability until they are settled.
On the latest balance sheet, the firm's liabilities exceed its assets by a wide margin.
Similardebt
Oppositeasset
Note
Accounting sets liabilities against their opposite, assets: what a business owes, such as loans, unpaid bills and wages due, against what it owns. In the traditional two-column balance sheet they sit on the right beside the owners' equity, and the two sides must come to the same total.
- 4A member of a team who is more of a hindrance than a help.
Without his glasses, our shortstop is a liability in the field.
The coach benched two players who had become liabilities on defense.
Oppositeasset
Note
It is a blunt verdict on a teammate, and a mildly insulting one, which speakers sometimes sharpen with an intensifier: "You're a bloody liability sometimes!" Informal and pointed, it belongs in banter and complaint rather than in a formal team report. It narrows the "drawback" meaning down to one person and what that person costs the side.
- 5The state of being prone or open to something, such as corrosion or infection.
The new alloy has a much lower liability to corrosion than ordinary steel.
Young children's liability to infection makes clean water especially important.
Similarsusceptibility, vulnerability
Oppositeresistance, immunity
Practice
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Origin
Formed from liable + -ity.