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Delicate   /dˈɛləkət/   Listen
Delicate

adjective
1.
Exquisitely fine and subtle and pleasing; susceptible to injury.  "Delicate china" , "A delicate flavor" , "The delicate wing of a butterfly"
2.
Marked by great skill especially in meticulous technique.
3.
Easily broken or damaged or destroyed.  Synonyms: fragile, frail.  "Fragile porcelain plates" , "Fragile old bones" , "A frail craft"
4.
Easily hurt.  Synonym: soft.  "A baby's delicate skin"
5.
Developed with extreme delicacy and subtlety.  Synonym: finespun.
6.
Difficult to handle; requiring great tact.  Synonyms: ticklish, touchy.  "Hesitates to be explicit on so ticklish a matter" , "A touchy subject"
7.
Of an instrument or device; capable of registering minute differences or changes precisely.



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"Delicate" Quotes from Famous Books



... feast one another many times, wherein they vse great diligence, especially in drinking one to another, insomuch that the better sort, least they might rudely commit some fault therein, does vse to reade certaine bookes written of duties and ceremonies apperteyning vnto banquets. To be delicate and fine, they put their meate into their mouthes with litle forkes, accounting it great rudenesse to touch it with their fingers: winter and sommer they drinke water as hot as they may possibly abide it. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt

... listening to it with a pretty appearance of dreaminess. She was conscious of her charming attitude, of the line made by her slender upraised arm, and not unaware of the soft and almost transparent beauty the light of a glowing fire gives to delicate flesh. Nevertheless, she really tried, in a perhaps half-hearted way, to withdraw her personality into the mist. And this she did because she knew well that her mother, not she, was en rapport with ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... Lohengrin the vividness of reality combined with the vanishing loveliness of a sweet dream. The idea of the swan, symbolizing the broad, shining river flowing from afar-off mysterious lands to the eternal sea, is given us in this phrase, as delicate and as firm, as unmistakable, as ever painter drew with his brush. Here we have, not indeed Montsalvat the domain of monks, but the land of ever-enduring dawn—a land that other poets have dreamed of, a land where hope could be subsisted on. From beginning to end Lohengrin, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... fairy-land—seemed quite as strange as if Cinderella had stepped out of the storybook with the avowed purpose of remaining with them until her lost slipper was found. Leonard, big and strong as he was, felt and interpreted the delicate and thrilling organism of his child, and, as Amy turned toward him, he said, with ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... of peace—and all enrolled themselves in the "crack" companies. No wonder, when the very best blood of the state ran in the veins of the humblest private; when men of letters and culture and wealth refused any but "the post of honor," with musket on shoulder; when the most delicate fingers of their fairest worked the flags that floated over them, and the softest voices urged them to their devoir; no wonder, then, that high on the roll of fame are now written the names of the Mobile Cadets—of the Gulf City ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon


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