Delicate means fine and easily damaged, the kind of thing you pick up with both hands. A thin wine glass, a moth wing, the lace on an old christening gown.
The word moves from touch to taste and smell: a delicate flavour is faint and easily lost, so you do not drown it in chilli. It moves again to situations, where a delicate negotiation or a delicate question about money can be ruined by one clumsy sentence. Somebody in delicate health is frail rather than breakable in the wine-glass sense. Delicate work is fine and skilful too: a surgeon making delicate stitches, the delicate carving on a spoon handle. The adverb is delicately, and delicates is the label on the wash cycle for clothes that must not be spun hard.
1adjectivedelicateEasily broken or harmed, and needing careful handling.~16%
“The delicate china had been in her family for a hundred years.”
synonyms: fragile, breakable
2adjectiveflavourFaint and subtle, and easy to lose under something stronger.~8%
“The soup has a delicate lemon flavour that pepper would ruin.”
3adjectivesensitiveNeeding careful and tactful treatment.~33%
“Telling him he had not got the job was a delicate business.”
4adjectivehealthNot strong in health; easily made ill.~2%
“She was a delicate child who missed whole terms of school.”
5adjectivefineFine and skilful in its detail.~41%
“The delicate stitching around the collar took her a whole evening.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: fragile
Delicate came through Middle English delicat from Latin delicatus, which meant delightful, soft and luxurious. It was a word about pleasure long before it was a word about weakness. It grew out of deliciae, pleasure and delight, and behind that delicio, to lure or entice. Delight and delicious are the same family, which is why delicate still carries a hint of something lovely and not only something breakable.
Proto-Italic
*lakjō — to draw, pull
Middle English
delicat
English, today
delicate
Built from
From Middle English delicat, from Latin dēlicātus (“giving pleasure, delightful, soft, luxurious, delicate, (in Medieval Latin also) fine, slender”), from dēlicia + -ātus (see -ate), usually in plural dēliciae (“pleasure, delight, luxury”), from dēliciō (“to allure, entice”), from dē- (“away”) + laciō (“to lure, to deceive”), from Proto-Italic lakjō (“to draw, pull”), of unknown ultimate origin. Compare delight, delicious and Spanish delgado (“thin, skinny”). The noun is from a substantivization of the adjective (see -ate).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA