malinger
General verb
To feign illness or incapacity in order to avoid duty or work.
He was accused of malingering to dodge the night shift.
Medicine verb
To feign or exaggerate illness in order to avoid duty or obtain some benefit.
The occupational health assessor was trained to distinguish genuine incapacity from a patient who might malinger.
Law verb
To feign or exaggerate illness in order to gain compensation.
The insurer alleged the claimant was malingering to inflate his loss-of-earnings claim.
Business verb
To pretend to be ill in order to avoid work.
Managers suspected he was malingering, since the absences always fell on a Monday.
Rarity runs from 0 (a word everyone knows) to 100 (almost never seen outside specialist or literary writing). Level is the word's real difficulty on the CEFR scale, from A1 to C2.
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