Flabby means soft and loose from lack of exercise. Flabby arms, gone flabby, a flabby stomach.
It is unkind about a body and precise about tissue: flabby means the muscle underneath has gone and the covering has not. Figuratively it describes anything slack and unfocused — flabby prose, a flabby argument, flabby management — and that use is a real criticism about lack of discipline. Note flabbiness; and that flabby is a variant of flappy, from flap, meaning to hang loose.
1adjectiveflabbySoft and loose from lack of exercise.
“After a winter without exercise, my arms had gone flabby.”
2adjectiveslackSlack and unfocused, of writing or management.
“The editor cut the flabby middle section of the novel by half.”
flabby is a quality of slackness.
Flabby is a variant of flappy, from flap, meaning to hang loose. Middle Dutch flabbe and Low German flabbe come from the same slack family.
Built from
From a variant of flappy, from flap (“to hang loose”). Compare English dialectal flapsy (“flabby”), Middle Dutch flabbe (“a slap in the face; a fan-blade; a hair ribbon; a wagging tongue”), Middle Low German flabbe (“a gaping mouth; a chatterbox”), Danish flab (“the jaw; cheeks; a malapert”), Swedish flabb, fläff (“the hanging underlip of an animal; guffaw; driveller”), German Flabbe (“a gob; muzzle”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire