frail
English
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /fɹeɪl/
Audio (AU) (file) - Rhymes: -eɪl
Etymology 1
From Middle English frele, fraill, from Old French fraile, from Latin fragilis. Cognate to fraction, fracture, and doublet of fragile.
Adjective
frail (comparative frailer, superlative frailest)
- Easily broken physically; not firm or durable; liable to fail and perish.
- c. 1587–1588, [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], part 1, 2nd edition, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, OCLC 932920499; reprinted as Tamburlaine the Great (A Scolar Press Facsimile), Menston, Yorkshire; London: Scolar Press, 1973, →ISBN, Act I, scene i:
- Returne with ſpeed, time paſſeth ſwift away,
Our life is fraile, and we may dye to day.
- 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
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- 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
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- Mentally fragile.
- Liable to fall from virtue or be led into sin; not strong against temptation; weak in resolution; unchaste.
Derived terms
- frail sister
- frailly
- frailness
Related terms
- fractal
- fraction
- fracture
- fragile
- fragility
- frailty
Translations
easily broken physically
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weak, infirm
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mentally fragile
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liable to fall from virtue
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked
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Noun
frail (plural frails)
- (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 284462; 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 849279868, 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.
Etymology 2
From Middle English frayel, from Old French frael, fraiel, of unknown origin; possibly a dissimilatory variant of flael, flaiel (“flail”).
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.
Etymology 3
Noun
frail (plural frails)
- (dialectal, obsolete) Synonym of flail.
- 1948, C. Henry Warren, The English Counties, Essex, Odhams, p. 170:
- The scythe, the sickle and the flail (or "frail", is it is invariably called) - these should surely be incorporated in the county arms, for on their use much of the prosperity of Essex has always rested until now.
- 1948, C. Henry Warren, The English Counties, Essex, Odhams, p. 170:
References
- frail in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913
Anagrams
- filar, flair