Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Lacking firmness; hanging limply.
  • adjective Lacking force, vigor, or effectiveness.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Soft and limber; lax; drooping by its own weight; without firmness or elasticity; flabby: as, flaccid flesh.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Yielding to pressure for want of firmness and stiffness; soft and weak; limber; lax; drooping; flabby

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Flabby.
  • adjective Soft; floppy.
  • adjective Lacking energy or vigor.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective out of condition; not strong or robust; incapable of exertion or endurance
  • adjective drooping without elasticity; wanting in stiffness

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin flaccidus, from flaccus, flabby.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin flaccidus.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word flaccid.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • Wait... why would this word be tagged "stiffness"? What am I missing?

    November 11, 2007

  • It's a degree of stiffness: IE a small degree!

    November 11, 2007

  • I'm not thinking about this.

    November 11, 2007

  • But... but... ?! I still think it's a weird tag.

    I think flaccid is an alsome word. It's way better than flabby.

    November 11, 2007

  • It might make more sense if there were other words tagged "stiffness," but this seems to be the only one.

    For some reason it reminds me of a snippet from This is Spinal Tap:

    "It's like, 'how much more black could this be?' and the answer is none. None more black."

    November 11, 2007

  • I'm going to make it my mission to tag some more words with "stiffness"---possibly completely at random.

    November 11, 2007

  • Or, you could resolve to make the stiffness tag somewhat useful rather than random, and tag everything that isn't stiff. Though it does seem a pretty good tag for random purposes. It will cause some head-scratching. ;)

    May I suggest tagging baculum? Nevermind, I'll do it myself. :)

    November 11, 2007

  • Way to make things more interesting, SoG!

    November 11, 2007

  • pronounced like "accident"

    November 19, 2009

  • I have always pronounced this to rhyme with "acid", and I see that the New Oxford American Dictionary acknowledges both pronunciations.

    November 19, 2009