Home / Words / proneNo. 0266

prone

/proʊn//prəʊn/·adjective
likely to do or suffer something, usually bad; inclined toward
Fig. 1 — Two houses stand on the same stretch of coast — one down in a low basin, the other up on the hill.
01Definition

Prone means tilted toward an outcome, almost always a bad one — accident-prone, prone to error, prone to flooding. The image is literally one of leaning: from the Latin pronus, 'leaning forward', as a slope leans downhill and lets everything slide the same way. To be prone to something is to carry a built-in inclination toward it, so it happens more easily than it should. A precarious structure is prone to collapse; a brittle one is prone to crack.

02In use
  • iLow-lying coastal towns are especially prone to flooding.
  • iiWhen he is tired, he is prone to careless mistakes.
  • iiiRushed work is prone to error in a way that careful work is not.
03Collocations
  • prone to error
  • accident-prone
  • prone to flooding
  • more prone to

Family proneness (noun)

04Relations

=liable, susceptible, inclined, disposed, apt

≠resistant, immune, resilient

06TOEFL & IELTS

TOEFL/IELTS passages on health, geography, and psychology use 'prone to' for vulnerabilities — 'prone to disease/error/flooding'. In Writing, 'X is prone to Y' is a clean way to state a tendency. Note the fixed compound 'accident-prone' and the preposition: prone *to* something. (A second, literal sense — lying face-down — appears in TOEFL science texts.)

07Asked
What is the difference between prone and supine?
Position words: prone is face-down, supine is face-up — anatomy, radiology and shooting sports depend on the pair. The mnemonic the textbooks share: supine has 'up' in it. The everyday sense of prone — inclined toward something bad — grew from the same posture: Latin pronus, leaning forward, a body already tipped in the direction it will fall.
Is 'prone to' followed by a noun or a verb?
Usually a noun or a gerund: prone to error, prone to flooding, prone to exaggerating. The infinitive is also recorded — prone to lose his temper — but the noun pattern dominates edited prose and is the safe exam choice. The frame also stacks into compounds, where the noun moves in front and the to disappears: accident-prone, drought-prone, injury-prone.
How does prone differ from susceptible and liable?
All three tilt toward misfortune, at different depths. Susceptible is openness to being affected — susceptible to infection, to flattery: the defences are thin. Liable leans toward law and consequence: liable to fines, liable to break. Prone is the standing tendency of character or position — it names what keeps happening. The scene above is prone exactly: nothing wrong with the low house except where it sits.
What does accident-prone mean?
Having accidents at a rate that starts to look like a personal attribute — the compound turns a run of bad luck into a standing property. It is gently comic in everyday use and serious in safety literature, where accident-prone workers and intersections get studied. The shape is productive: any noun plus -prone claims a built-in lean — error-prone code, flood-prone plains, injury-prone athletes.
What is the opposite of prone?
For the tendency sense: resistant or immune — tilted away rather than toward: resistant to error, immune to flattery. For the position sense, the anatomical mirror is supine, face-up. There is no single word meaning 'unlikely to suffer things in general'; English handles it by negating (not prone to panic) or by switching frames entirely — robust, unshakeable.