frail

Etymology

Borrowed from Old French fraile, from Latin fragilis. Cognate to fraction, fracture, and fragile, which is an etymological doublet.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /fɹeɪl/
• Rhymes: -eɪl

Adjective

frail (comparative frailer, superlative frailest)

1. Easily broken; mentally or physically fragile; not firm or durable; liable to fail and perish; easily destroyed; not tenacious of life; 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.

2. Liable to fall from virtue or be led into sin; not strong against temptation; weak in resolution; unchaste.

Noun

frail (plural frails)

1. A basket made of rushes, used chiefly to hold figs and raisins.
2. The quantity of raisins contained in a frail.
3. A rush for weaving baskets.
4. (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.

   • 1933, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, edition 1, Book 2, Chapter XXII:

     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.

Verb

frail (third-person singular simple present frails, present participle frailing, simple past and past participle frailed)

1. To play a stringed instrument, usually a banjo, by picking with the back of a fingernail.

References

• frail in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913

Anagrams

• filar, flair