Fragile means it breaks if you drop it. The word stamped in red on a parcel of glasses, the tape wrapped twice round a box of plates.
It moves easily off physical things: a fragile peace, a fragile economy, a fragile ceasefire that one bad night could end. People get it too — fragile health, a fragile ego, and in Britain 'feeling a bit fragile' is a polite way of saying hungover. Fragility is the noun. Fragile is not frail: frail is for a person weak with age or illness, fragile is for anything that could break — and the joke is that they are the same Latin word, arriving in English by two different roads.
1adjectivefragileEasily broken or damaged.~16%
“The vase is fragile, so wrap it twice before you post it.”
2adjectivedestroyedEasily destroyed or upset; not stable.~69%
“The agreement is fragile and could fall apart within weeks.”
3adjectiveweakWeak or shaky in health or spirits.~15%
“She looked fragile after three weeks in hospital.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
fragile is a quality of breaking easily.
Also accepted in games: breakable
Fragile came through Middle French from Latin fragilis, built on frangere, to break — the same root behind fracture and fraction, which is a broken piece of a number. English already had the word in a worn-down French form, frail. So fragile and frail are twins raised apart: one is used of glass, the other of people.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰreg-
Latin
fragilis
Middle French
fragile
English, today
fragile
Built from
Middle French fragile, from Latin fragilis, formed on frag-, the root of frangere (“to break”). Cognate with fraction, fracture and a doublet of frail.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA