overreliance

noun

over·​re·​li·​ance ˌō-vər-ri-ˈlī-ən(t)s 

: the act or state of relying on something or someone too much : excessive reliance

One of my top priorities next year is to have an energy policy that begins to address all facets of our overreliance on fossil fuels.

—Barack Obama

I shy away from prescribing sleeping pills … to avoid overreliance on them.

—Andrew Weil

Examples of overreliance in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

There were also fierce debates about everything from the glut of preshow commercials to an overreliance on franchise fare. —Brent Lang, Variety, 21 Apr. 2026

Decades of American farmers’ overreliance on both fertilizers and quick chemical solutions like pesticides and herbicides have slowly chipped away at soil health for decades. —Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Fortune, 16 Apr. 2026

Listen to song after song and his funny quirks turn repetitive, with an overreliance on bass-heavy Detroit-meets-Memphis Young & Turnt 2 type beats that sound straight off the CMG assembly line. —Alphonse Pierre, Pitchfork, 15 Apr. 2026

The point is that certain kinds of knowledge have long been passed down tacitly from generation to generation, but our culture, with its wild overreliance on the explicit and the useful, will soon produce people on whom such knowledge will be lost. —Kristen Roupenian, New Yorker, 6 Apr. 2026

Word History

First Known Use

1833, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for overreliance

• geoscience
• neuroscience
• noncompliance
• pseudoscience
• appliance
• compliance
• defiance
• reliance
• science