"forcible-feeble" meaning in English

See forcible-feeble in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Adjective

Forms: more forcible-feeble [comparative], most forcible-feeble [superlative]
Etymology: From Francis Feeble, a character in William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, to whom Falstaff derisively applies the epithet forcible. Etymology templates: {{m|en|forcible}} forcible Head templates: {{en-adj}} forcible-feeble (comparative more forcible-feeble, superlative most forcible-feeble)
  1. (archaic) Having a vigorous appearance, but in reality weak or insipid. Wikipedia link: Henry IV, Part 2, William Shakespeare Tags: archaic Synonyms: forcible-Feeble

Download JSON data for forcible-feeble meaning in English (2.5kB)

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  "etymology_text": "From Francis Feeble, a character in William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, to whom Falstaff derisively applies the epithet forcible.",
  "forms": [
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      "tags": [
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          "ref": "1879, Henry James, chapter III, in Hawthorne, London: Macmillan & Co., page 63",
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        {
          "ref": "1922, James Joyce, Ulysses, part III",
          "text": "Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to grind, was airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent the natural resources of Ireland or something of that sort which he described in his lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on the face of God's earth […]",
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        "(archaic) Having a vigorous appearance, but in reality weak or insipid."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "forcible-Feeble"
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  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "more forcible-feeble",
      "tags": [
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    },
    {
      "form": "most forcible-feeble",
      "tags": [
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          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1879, Henry James, chapter III, in Hawthorne, London: Macmillan & Co., page 63",
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}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.