flimsy
Meanings
adj
- Likely to bend or break under pressure; easily damaged; frail, unsubstantial.
- Of clothing: very light and thin.
- Of an argument, explanation, etc.: ill-founded, unconvincing, weak; also, unimportant; paltry, trivial.
- Of a person: lacking depth of character or understanding; frivolous, superficial.
- Of a person, their physical makeup, or their health: delicate, frail.
noun
- A thing which is ill-founded, unconvincing, or weak.
- Thin typing paper used together with carbon paper in a typewriter to make multiple copies of a document; (countable) a sheet of such paper.
- A document printed or typed on such paper.
- A service certificate.
- A banknote; (uncountable) paper money.
- The text to be set into pages of magazines, newspapers, etc.; copy.
- A hexahedral metal container with a capacity of four imperial gallons (about 18 litres) used by the British Army during World War II to hold fuel.
verb
- To make (something) likely to be easily damaged.
- To type or write (text) on a flimsy (“sheet of thin typing paper used together with carbon paper in a typewriter to make multiple copies of a document”) (noun sense 2); to distribute such flimsies.
- To treat (someone or something) as paltry or unimportant; to demean, to underestimate.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
The origin of the adjective is uncertain; it is possibly from flim(-flam) (“(noun) false information presented as true, misinformation, nonsense; poor attempt at deception, confidence trick, pretence; (adjective) frivolous, nonsensical; deceptive; fictitious”) or a metathesis of film (“thin layer of a substance; slender thread”) + -sy (suffix forming adjectives and nouns). The noun and verb are derived from the noun. Noun sense 4 (“metal container”) refers to the fact that the containers often split along their seams and leaked.
Synonyms
Antonyms
Derived words
Translations
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.