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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

facile.

Easy; contemptibly easy.

6 characters3 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ˈfæs.aɪl/Received-Pronunciation/ˈfæs.əl/General-American[ˈfæs.ɫ̩]General-American/ˈfä.sʌɪl/Scotland
  1. Easy; contemptibly easy.

    derogatory · usually
  2. Amiable, flexible, easy to get along with.

    archaic
    His facile disposition made him many friends.
  3. Effortless, fluent (of work, abilities etc.).

    Her writing was facile and articulate.
  4. Lazy, simplistic, superficial (especially of explanations, discussions etc.).

    He arrived with a facile understanding of her works.
  5. Of a reaction or other process, taking place readily.

    Decarboxylation of beta-keto acids is facile.
Where this word comes from

Borrowed from Middle French facile, from Latin facilis (“easy to do, easy, doable”), from Latin facere (“to do, make”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁- (“to do, put”) Compare Spanish and Portuguese fácil (“easy”), Catalan fàcil, Romanian facil. First use appears c. 1484 in a translation by William Caxton.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.