Definition
Indifferent refers to the state of being uninterested or unconcerned about a particular thing, or having no preference or bias towards something.
Pronunciation
US English
UK English
See Synonyms, Antonyms and Usage
Excerpts from News Articles
1
Japanese firms are often seen as lacklustre acquisition targets, due partly to a perception of being indifferent to shareholders, something the government has long wanted to change to spur greater industry consolidation.
2
Outside influences have often played a role in getting cosmetics to prisoners. In 1970 in Chicago, philanthropic millionaire W. Clement Stone developed a prison charm school. "We are going to get these women to think they have outer charm, (then) they can work on their inner charm themselves," he told Sepia magazine at the time. This push was international. In 1973, a German social worker told Reuters lipstick and nail varnish helped prisoners "overcome a feeling of indifference and resignation."
3
“They are the only ones that are explicitly saying ‘we need this war to survive. We need this war to continue to restore the greatness of Russian Empire,’” she said, adding that while most Russians remain indifferent to what is happening in Ukraine – as long as it’s not affecting them personally – the Kremlin can rely on the bloggers to keep beating the war drums.
4
Representatives of the US, UK, Albania and Malta then walked out of the conference room as Lvova-Belova was speaking. Russia’s UN envoy, Vassily Nebenzia, described the move as “a clear demonstration of their indifference to the fate of the children of Donbas and Ukrainian children.”
5
The strike was condemned internationally, with one top UN official saying global indifference to the situation in Myanmar contributed to the attack.
6
If the establishments were open during the day, Prost would enter and ask for permission to take photos in order "to not look suspicious... and explain what my intentions were," he said. The interiors rarely lived up to the tantalizing promises plastered across the signs outside, but the photographer met a host of characters during his five-week trip, from indifferent bouncers to managers who were thrilled about the project.
7
It’s a lesson I’ve passed on to my own children and grandchildren by taking them to Dachau, a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, to understand for themselves the depths of this evil and the culpability of indifference .
8
And if the IPL in its early years was defined by bluster and mis-steps, its most arresting quality these days is a sense of utter certainty: the hard edges of political and financial power muscling a path to your television screen, the complete confidence in the primacy of the product. The IPL is indifferent to your opinion of it. Your presence at the spectacle is not required. But you will be present nonetheless, because Jos Buttler is teeing off at a strike rate of 240, and you will definitely want to watch that.
9
“When you create something that is a naturalised, geographical monopoly,” he says, “you need really effective regulation, because by definition, the companies are set up to take advantage. Instead you’ve got 30 years of political indifference and regulatory failure. And guess what? In that vacuum, the water companies, financed by venture capital, completely game the system.”
10
It is painful to juxtapose the words uttered then with now, with the blithe indifference of so many countries, including the US and UK, to the flouting, or threatened flouting, of international law. As for the Russian government, it continued to work closely with the Nuremberg Memorial Centre up to and shortly beyond the trials’ 75th anniversary commemorations in November 2020. Contact was then severed by both sides, officials tell me, with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
11
The order, in short, has none of the traditional judicial pretexts of impartiality or indifference to the policy outcome; it is not a document concerned with the law, but with enforcing an ideology. It reads like the rantings of an extremist activist, because it is.
12
Tom Andrews, a UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, criticised the international response to the crisis in Myanmar: “The Myanmar military’s attacks against innocent people, including today’s airstrike in Sagaing, is enabled by world indifference and those supplying them with weapons. How many Myanmar children need to die before world leaders take strong, coordinated action to stop this carnage?”
13
Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, began her own, post-Macron China trip last week, reportedly intent on damage limitation. Visiting Tianjin, she said pointedly that “we cannot be indifferent ” to Taiwan. “We are currently seeing how important it is to have partners around the world who share our values at our side when we face our own security threats.” Baerbock’s words were a not-so-subtle rebuke to Macron.
14
Like some of Charles’s recent walkabouts, the dish has been regarded as a good use of leftover eggs. Traditionally, indifferent cuisine is a celebrated feature of royal occasions. Of a banquet on the eve of Elizabeth’s coronation, Richard Crossman noted in his diary that “the food was cold and not very good”.
15
Perhaps those polling numbers are flimsy — few surveys have been conducted on the subject, which makes those we do have a bit tricky to contextualize. But if the figures are even mostly reliable, they reflect a remarkable indifference on the part of the country to the source of a once-in-a-century disease disaster. It would be as though following a catastrophic earthquake, we didn’t bother to sort out whether it had been caused by local fracking but instead argued endlessly about the imperfections of disaster response.
16
Mr. Youngkin hopes to flip the state legislature to a Republican majority. That could earn him a closer look from rank-and-file Republicans across the country, who so far have been indifferent to the presidential chatter surrounding him in the news media, and among heavyweight donors he would need to keep pace alongside more prominent candidates. He has yet to crack 1 percent in polls about the potential Republican field.
17
It is apparently no harm and no foul for a justice of the Supreme Court to show willful and repeated indifference to disclosure requirements under the law.
18
The region's stubbornly low utilization of clean power in its electricity mix - less than 5% compared to a global average of 38.2%, according to Ember - also suggests a complete indifference making changes to its power generation systems.
19
Such arrogance and indifference to the public appeal could prove reckless, allowing for further political escalation on the streets of Israel, while instigating further crisis in the occupied Palestinian territories.
20
Kacsmaryk is not only indifferent to the criticisms, he also can take confidence in knowing that his ruling will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit — where Republican-appointed jurists dominate on an appellate bench that is “as conservative a federal appeals court as any of us have seen in our lifetimes.”
21
He cited other sources of discouragement: "the attitudes of calculation and indifference that seem to prevail in society, the cancer of corruption, the spread of injustice, the icy winds of war."
22
Often enough, I.R.A. bombs killed ordinary Irish people—in one case, five cleaning ladies. The British government persisted with a response that was, by turns, indifferent , haphazard, or brutal. The level of collusion between government forces and the primarily Protestant unionist paramilitaries, who were waging their own terror campaign in Belfast, is still a matter of debate.
23
The campaign began on April 3, 1963, with sit-ins, economic boycotts, mass protests, and marches on City Hall. The demonstrations faced challenges from many sides, including an indifferent African American community, adversarial white and Black leaders, and a hostile commissioner of public safety, Eugene (“Bull”) Connor. On April 12 King was arrested for violating an anti-protest injunction and placed in solitary confinement.
24
Myth 3: People who are declared incompetent are indifferent to having their decision-making abilities taken away
25
This kind of indifference to the effect one has on others is morally criticisable. It has always struck me as odd that everyone grants that our actions and words are apt for moral critique, but once we enter the realm of thought we’re off the hook. Our beliefs about others matter. We care what others think of us.
26
He read law with Wythe from 1762 to 1767, then left Williamsburg to practice, mostly representing small-scale planters from the western counties in cases involving land claims and titles. Although he handled no landmark cases and came across as a nervous and somewhat indifferent speaker before the bench, he earned a reputation as a formidable legal scholar. He was a shy and extremely serious young man.
27
He remembers a woman sitting on the side of the road with a “look of tired indifference … as if she’d seen this before and would see it again.” He recounts firing three rounds at a dump truck that ignored the Marines’ orders to stop and that they worried might be loaded with enemy or explosives. Instead, the cargo was “20 women, children and fathers” who emerged screaming. “By the grace of God no one died,” McLaughlin wrote, “although one guy had a new hole in him and tons of blood. He lived though.”
28
The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, which draws on the membership of dozens of lawmakers from around the world, primarily from Europe, issued a statement stressing “that the president’s words are severely out of step with the feeling across Europe’s legislatures and beyond.” It said Macron’s seeming indifference to Taiwan’s plight disregarded “the vital place of Taiwan in the global economy” and undermined “decades-long commitment of the international community to maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait.”
29
” Mostly, the men of these tales are mediocre at best, abusers at worst. Women are often indifferent to men’s affection, an attitude made all the more stark because it is affirmed rather than altered by self-reflection. In “Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic!,” a woman on a bad date thinks of the older, fashion-backward man she’s with, “God, he looks idiotic,” then: “Why am I like this? My heart’s made of stone.
30
As Bolsonaro crippled Ibama, the environmental agency charged with keeping the miners out, their number ballooned to 20,000. The former president’s critics now say he is guilty not only of indifference , but of a crime: genocide.
31
The implementation of the Good Friday Agreement has, in recent years, been significantly undermined by the government’s focus on matters English. There has been a notable determination that British army veterans should not be prosecuted, or indeed even properly investigated for conflict-era offences, and indifference about the implications of such a policy in Northern Ireland and its compatibility with international human rights law.
32
The antisemitic tropes present in Hogwarts Legacy have such deep roots in our shared cultural repertoire that they remain invisible to us, or we remain indifferent to them.
33
The poor are dreaded from a position of threat and scorned from a position of imagined superiority. These emotional elements may be present in responses to the poor, but indifference and neglect are at least equally powerful. The poor suffer as much from a cold lack of concern, reinforced by spatial separation, as they do from heated aversion.
34
Our discussions show that East Jerusalem Palestinians feel an an overarching sense of indifference and resignation to whatever will happen.
35
In New York State Supreme Court on Thursday, a former model filed a lawsuit alleging that she was raped by Fabrizio Lombardo, a onetime associate of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. The suit also named Weinstein, Disney, and Miramax as defendants, saying they "were negligent or recklessly indifferent to the harm that Lombardo inflicted."
