0 past simple and past participle of languish --
1 to exist in an unpleasant or unwanted situation, often for a long time: --
In another age, in another time, she would have languished all her life in hospital.
He referred to the fact that our internal trade had got better, but that our foreign trade still languished.
I speak as one who had to study by the light of a paraffin lamp while the animals languished in the modern amenity of electricity.
The teaching of medical professionalism in general, and its social dimension in particular, has languished, despite the development of a strong ethical commitment to patient rights and shared decisionmaking.
Such complex and overlapping processes make it clear why the study of regolith has languished as a field of geological study until application of the modern armamentum of analytical techniques.
By the 1950s few developmental psychologists doubted that infants languished in deprived institutional settings, but a strong controversy existed regarding the immutability of these early delays.
Because of the relative cheapness and visibility of lighting, otherwise backward cities and towns could use it to project an image of modernity while the rest of their infrastructure languished.
Tens of thousands of arrested people have languished in the cells for years on end.
