© 2019 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the »https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/» Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. V2O3 famously features all four combinations of paramagnetic versus antiferromagnetic and metallic versus insulating states of matter in response to percent-level doping, pressure in the GPa range, and temperature below 300 K. Using time-of-flight neutron spectroscopy combined with density functional theory calculations of magnetic interactions, we have mapped and analyzed the inelastic magnetic neutron scattering cross section over a wide range of energy and momentum transfer in the chromium-stabilized antiferromagnetic and paramagnetic insulating phases. Our results reveal an important magnetic frustration and degeneracy of the paramagnetic insulating phase which is relieved by the rhombohedral-to-monoclinic transition at TN=185 K. This leads to the recognition that magnetic frustration is an inherent property of the paramagnetic phase in (V1-xCrx)2O3 and plays a key role in suppressing the magnetic long-range-ordering temperature and exposing a large phase space for the paramagnetic Mott metal-insulator transition to occur.