unability

plural unabilities

1. uncountableusuallyLack of ability; inability.

   difficulty doth not make me despaire, much lesse my unability: for it is but mine owne.

   1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 12, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book II, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC

   5 more examples

   there being so many whose businesse and profession meerly it is, to be the champions of Truth; which if they neglect, what can be imputed but their sloth, or unability?

   1644, John Milton, Areopagitica

   Until today we have not made much progress over Democrit who postulated that it is only our unability to register and explain a great number of fast events in a non-linear way, i.e. not according to the principle of cause and effect.

   1999, Albert J. Widmann, The Stone Age of Faith

   For the most common unabilities of disabled and older to perform different tasks in the kitchen, some adapted elements, including a robot-arm, have been designed.

   1999, Christian Bühler, Harry Knops, Assistive Technology on the Threshold of the New Millennium

   Failures were related to the unability to selectively place the guiding catheter at the coronary ostium in 2 cases and to the unability to cross the lesion in 8 cases.

   2012, Johan H. C. Reiber, P.W. Serruys, Advances in Quantitative Coronary Arteriography

   Equally ambivalent is the attempt to operationalize country risk by differentiating a sovereign debtor's "unability" and "unwillingness" to pay.

   2012, Walter Berger, Financial Innovations in International Debt Management