frail
English
Etymology
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Borrowed from Old French fraile, from Latin fragilis. Cognate to fraction, fracture, and doublet of fragile.
Pronunciation
Adjective
frail (comparative frailer, superlative frailest)
- Easily broken physically; not firm or durable; liable to fail and perish
- 1831, John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography: Volume 1, Blue-grey Fly-catcher
- Its nest is composed of the frailest materials, and is light and small in proportion to the size of the bird
- 1831, John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography: Volume 1, Blue-grey Fly-catcher
- weak; infirm.
- 1993, John Banville, Ghosts:
- Frail smoke of morning in the air and a sort of muffled hum that is not sound but is not silence either.
- 1922, Isaac Rosenberg, Dawn
- O as the soft and frail lights break upon your eyelids
- mentally fragile
- Liable to fall from virtue or be led into sin; not strong against temptation; weak in resolution; unchaste.
Related terms
Terms etymologically related to frail
Translations
easily broken, mentally or physically fragile
|
liable to fall from virtue
Noun
frail (plural frails)
- A basket made of rushes, used chiefly to hold figs and raisins.
- The quantity of fruit or other items contained in a frail.
- A rush for weaving baskets.
- (dated, slang) A girl.
- 1931, Cab Calloway / Irving Mills, ‘Minnie the Moocher’:
- She was the roughest, toughest frail, but Minnie had a heart as big as a whale.
- 1934, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night: A Romance, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC; republished as chapter X, in Malcolm Cowley, editor, Tender is the Night: A Romance [...] With the Author’s Final Revisions, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, →OCLC, book IV (Escape: 1925–1929), page 238:
- There were five people in the Quirinal bar after dinner, a high-class Italian frail who sat on a stool making persistent conversation against the bartender's bored: “Si … Si … Si,” a light, snobbish Egyptian who was lonely but chary of the woman, and the two Americans.
- 1939, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Penguin 2011, p. 148:
- ‘She's pickin' 'em tonight, right on the nose,’ he said. ‘That tall black-headed frail.’
- 1941, Preston Sturges, Sullivan's Travels, published in Five Screenplays, →ISBN, page 77:
- Sullivan, the girl and the butler get to the ground. The girl wears a turtle-neck sweater, a cap slightly sideways, a torn coat, turned-up pants and sneakers.
- SULLIVAN Why don't you go back with the car... You look about as much like a boy as Mae West.
- THE GIRL All right, they'll think I'm your frail.
- 1931, Cab Calloway / Irving Mills, ‘Minnie the Moocher’:
Verb
frail (third-person singular simple present frails, present participle frailing, simple past and past participle frailed)
- To play a stringed instrument, usually a banjo, by picking with the back of a fingernail.
References
- “frail”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
Anagrams
Categories:
- English terms borrowed from Old French
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- English terms derived from Latin
- English doublets
- English 1-syllable words
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