flabby
English edit
Etymology edit
From a variant of flappy, from flap (“to hang loose”). Compare English dialectal flapsy (“flabby”), Middle Dutch flabbe (“a slap in the face; a fan-blade; a hair ribbon; a wagging tongue”), Middle Low German flabbe (“a gaping mouth; a chatterbox”), Danish flab (“the jaw; cheeks; a malapert”), Swedish flabb, fläff (“the hanging underlip of an animal; guffaw; driveller”), German Flabbe (“a gob; muzzle”).
Pronunciation edit
Adjective edit
flabby (comparative flabbier, superlative flabbiest)
- Yielding to the touch, and easily moved or shaken; hanging loose by its own weight; lacking firmness; flaccid.
- 1867 December 28, John Wades, “External Manual Pressure during Labour”, in The British Medical Journal, volume 2, page 601:
- My attention was accidentally drawn to this aid, some five or six years ago, while attending a lady (multipara) in her confinement, who suffered from umbilical hernia, with large flabby abdomen.
- 1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part I, page 210:
- A neglected gap was all the gate it had, and the first glance at the place was enough to let you see the flabby devil was running that show.
- 1961, The Violin Makers' Journal - Volume 5, page 71:
- The strings of some violins when up to pitch are loose and flabby; some are very taut and hard.
- 2008, Kevin Cameron, Sportbike Performance Handbook, →ISBN, page 135:
- Chassis of 1950s-1970s bikes are flabby tubular structures, often weak to the point of lacking straight-line stability!
- (of wine) Having a slight lack of acidity; having mild sweetness.
- 1996, Emile Peynaud, Jacques Blouin, The Taste of Wine: The Art Science of Wine Appreciation, →ISBN, page 229:
- A flabby wine might be described as a wine in which nothing stands out.
- 2008, Thomas Pellechia, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting and Running a Winery, →ISBN, page 103:
- An extremely hot region will give you flabby wine.
- (of writing, etc.) overwrought.
- 2014, Mary Ellen Guffey, Dana Loewy, Business Communication: Process and Product, →ISBN, page 178:
- As you revise, focus on eliminating flabby expressions. This takes conscious effort. As one expert copyeditor observed, “Trim sentences, like trim bodies, usually require far more effort than flabby ones.
- (mathematics) Which forms a surjection from the domain to every open subset of the codomain.
- a flabby sheaf on a paracompact space
Synonyms edit
- (having a slight lack of acidity): flat
Antonyms edit
Derived terms edit
Translations edit
yielding to the touch
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