Definitions

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

  • adjective Capable of being shaped or formed, as by hammering or pressure.
  • adjective Easily controlled or influenced.
  • adjective Able to adjust to changing circumstances; adaptable.
  • adjective Capable of being changed or adjusted to meet particular or varied needs.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Capable of being shaped or extended by beating or rolling; capable of extension by hammering; reducible to a laminated form by beating, as gold, which may be beaten into leaves (gold-foil) of extreme thinness; hence, capable of being shaped by outside influence; yielding. See foil.

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

  • adjective Capable of being extended or shaped by beating with a hammer, or by the pressure of rollers; -- applied to metals.
  • adjective Capable of being influenced to behave as desired; tractable; -- used mostly of children.
  • adjective iron that is capable of extension or of being shaped under the hammer; decarbonized cast iron. See under Iron.
  • adjective articles cast from pig iron and made malleable by heating then for several days in the presence of some substance, as hematite, which deprives the cast iron of some of its carbon.

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

  • adjective Able to be hammered into thin sheets; capable of being extended or shaped by beating with a hammer, or by the pressure of rollers.
  • adjective metaphorical Flexible, liable to change.
  • adjective cryptography, of an algorithm in which an adversary can alter a ciphertext such that it decrypts to a related plaintext

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

  • adjective capable of being shaped or bent or drawn out
  • adjective easily influenced

Etymologies

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

[Middle English, from Old French, from Medieval Latin malleābilis, from malleāre, to hammer, from Latin malleus, hammer; see melə- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English malliable, borrowed from Late Latin malleābilis, derived from malleāre ("to hammer"), from malleus ("hammer"), from Proto-Indo-European *mal-ni- (“crushing”), an extended variant of Proto-Indo-European *melH₂- (“crush, grind”).

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