weak

/week/, adj., weaker, weakest.

1. not strong; liable to yield, break, or collapse under pressure or strain; fragile; frail: a weak fortress; a weak spot in armor.

2. lacking in bodily strength or healthy vigor, as from age or sickness; feeble; infirm: a weak old man; weak eyes.

3. not having much political strength, governing power, or authority: a weak nation; a weak ruler.

4. lacking in force, potency, or efficacy; impotent, ineffectual, or inadequate: weak sunlight; a weak wind.

5. lacking in rhetorical or creative force or effectiveness: a weak reply to the charges; one of the author's weakest novels.

6. lacking in logical or legal force or soundness: a weak argument.

7. deficient in mental power, intelligence, or judgment: a weak mind.

8. not having much moral strength or firmness, resolution, or force of character: to prove weak under temptation; weak compliance.

9. deficient in amount, volume, loudness, intensity, etc.; faint; slight: a weak current of electricity; a weak pulse.

10. deficient, lacking, or poor in something specified: a hand weak in trumps; I'm weak in spelling.

11. deficient in the essential or usual properties or ingredients: weak tea.

12. unstressed, as a syllable, vowel, or word.

13. (of Germanic verbs) inflected with suffixes, without inherited change of the root vowel, as English work, worked, or having a preterit ending in a dental, as English bring, brought.

14. (of Germanic nouns and adjectives) inflected with endings originally appropriate to stems terminating in -n, as the adjective alte in German der alte Mann ("the old man").

15. (of wheat or flour) having a low gluten content or having a poor quality of gluten.

16. Photog. thin; not dense.

17. Com. characterized by a decline in prices: The market was weak in the morning but rallied in the afternoon.

[1250-1300; ME weik < ON veikr; c. OE wac, D week, G weich; akin to OE wican to yield, give way, ON vikja to move, turn, draw back, G weichen to yield]

Syn. 1. breakable, delicate. 2. senile, sickly, unwell, invalid. WEAK, DECREPIT, FEEBLE, WEAKLY imply a lack of strength or of good health. WEAK means not physically strong, because of extreme youth, old age, illness, etc.: weak after an attack of fever. DECREPIT means old and broken in health to a marked degree: decrepit and barely able to walk. FEEBLE denotes much the same as WEAK, but connotes being pitiable or inferior: feeble and almost senile.

WEAKLY suggests a long-standing sickly condition, a state of chronic bad health: A weakly child may become a strong adult. 4. ineffective. 6. unsound, ineffective, inadequate, illogical, inconclusive, unsustained, unsatisfactory, lame, vague. 7. unintelligent, simple, foolish, stupid, senseless, silly. 8. vacillating, wavering, unstable, irresolute, fluctuating, undecided, weak-kneed. 9. slender, slim, inconsiderable, flimsy, poor, trifling, trivial. 11. wanting, short, lacking.

Ant. 1. strong.

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