[syn: flimsy, fragile, slight, tenuous, thin]
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
Fragile \Frag"ile\, a. [L. fragilis, from frangere to break; cf.
F. fragile. See Break, v. t., and cf. Frail, a.]
Easily broken; brittle; frail; delicate; easily destroyed.
[1913 Webster]
The state of ivy is tough, and not fragile. --Bacon.
Syn: Brittle; infirm; weak; frail; frangible; slight. --
Frag"ile*ly, adv.
[1913 Webster]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
fragile
adj 1: easily broken or damaged or destroyed; "a kite too
delicate to fly safely"; "fragile porcelain plates";
"fragile old bones"; "a frail craft" [syn: delicate,
fragile, frail]
2: vulnerably delicate; "she has the fragile beauty of youth"
3: lacking substance or significance; "slight evidence"; "a
tenuous argument"; "a thin plot"; a fragile claim to fame"
[syn: flimsy, fragile, slight, tenuous, thin]
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0:
93 Moby Thesaurus words for "fragile":
breakable, brittle, brittle as glass, capricious, changeable,
cheap-jack, cobwebby, corruptible, crackable, crisp, crispy,
crumbly, crushable, dainty, deciduous, decrepit, delicate,
delicately weak, dying, effeminate, ephemeral, evanescent, fading,
feeble, fickle, fissile, fleeting, flimsy, flitting, fly-by-night,
flying, fracturable, frail, frangible, friable, fugacious,
fugitive, gimcrack, gimcracky, gossamery, impermanent, impetuous,
impulsive, inconstant, infirm, insubstantial, jerry, jerry-built,
lacerable, light, lightweight, momentary, mortal, mutable,
namby-pamby, nondurable, nonpermanent, papery, passing,
pasteboardy, perishable, puny, rickety, scissile, shaky,
shatterable, shattery, shivery, short, short-lived, sissified,
sleazy, slight, splintery, tacky, temporal, temporary, tenuous,
thin, transient, transitive, transitory, undurable, unenduring,
unsound, unstable, unsubstantial, volatile, vulnerable, weak,
weakly, wispy, womanish
The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003):
fragile
adj.
Syn brittle.
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):
brittle
fragile
Said of software that is functional but easily
broken by changes in operating environment or configuration,
or by any minor tweak to the software itself. Also, any
system that responds inappropriately and disastrously to
abnormal but expected external stimuli; e.g. a file system
that is usually totally scrambled by a power failure is said
to be brittle. This term is often used to describe the
results of a research effort that were never intended to be
robust, but it can be applied to commercially developed
software, which displays the quality far more often than it
ought to.
Opposite of robust.
[Jargon File]
(1995-05-09)