FACILE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Facile

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/fˈæsəl/ Listen

adjective

Facile adj.

Easy to be done or performed: not difficult; performable or attainable with little labor. "Order... will render the work facile and delightful."

Easy to be surmounted or removed; easily conquerable; readily mastered. "The facile gates of hell too slightly barred."

Easy of access or converse; mild; courteous; not haughty, austere, or distant; affable; complaisant. "I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet."

Easily persuaded to good or bad; yielding; ductile to a fault; pliant; flexible. "Since Adam, and his facile consort Eve, Lost Paradise, deceived by me." "This is treating Burns like a child, a person of so facile a disposition as not to be trusted without a keeper on the king's highway."

Ready; quick; expert; as, he is facile in expedients; he wields a facile pen.

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Etymology of 'Facile'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Facile" Quotes from Famous Books

... towns taken, and provinces overrun with a rapidity much less honorable to France than disgraceful to Holland. No victory was gained—no resistance offered; and it is disgusting to look back on the fulsome panegyrics with which courtiers and poets lauded Louis for those facile and inglorious triumphs. The Prince of Orange had received the command of a nominal army of seventy thousand men; but with this undisciplined and discouraged mass he could attempt nothing. He prudently retired into the province of Holland, ...

— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... of genius now as we did a generation ago, we can yet recognize the difference between the fervor of that divine birth and the cantering of the livery Pegasus forth and back, along the vulgar boulevards over which facile talent rides his daily hack. Only once or twice, in his own private note-book, or in a letter to his wife when it was needful, in sickness and loneliness, to strengthen her will and his by testifying his own deepest consciousness of power, did he whisper ...

— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... name of Caliban as the alert and witty chroniqueur of the Figaro and as the facile rhymester of its lyre comique, has written a few serious poems of direct and vigorous expression, especially under the inspiration of the memory of the war ...

— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... succinct, and may be worth giving for its academic flavour:—'Jam inde a pueritia literarum studio imbutus, et in celeberrimo Etonensi gymnasio informatus, ad nostram accessit academiam, ubi morum honestate, pietate, et pudore nemini aequalium secundus, indole et ingenio facile omnibus antecellebat. Summis deinde nostrae academiae honoribus cumulatus ad res civiles cum magna omnium expectatione se contulit; expectatione tamen major omni evasit. In senatus enim domum inferiorem cooptatus, eam ad negotia tractanda ...

— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... "Ravenshoe" in this year of 1917, and to me the world seems to have travelled so far since its publication in 1862, that its aims, its ideals, and its point of view, are hardly credible. Through it all runs that facile spirit of optimism which seems to me to have distinguished much of the thought of the mid-Victorian era, that air of "All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds," that insular pride of which I have been speaking, but which to us now appears the narrowest and worst form ...

— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

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