English Explanatory Dictionary

never event

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. A bad event that should never occur.
  2. A serious adverse medical event that should never occur and thus is, by strict definitions of preventability, always preventable, being unambiguous, clearly identifiable and measurable, and resulting in death or significant disability.
  3. A particularly shocking preventable medical error that should never occur.

Word forms

never event never events

Etymology

The strictest sense, referring to a particularly shocking medical error that should never happen, was the original sense of a never event (circa 2001), although a nuclear power industry publication from the 1980s mentioned a "once-in-a-never event", a collocation playing on such predecessors as once-in-a-blue-moon event and once-in-a-lifetime event.

This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.
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