flimsy

English

WOTD – 28 April 2025

Etymology

A flimsy (adjective sense 1) wooden gate in the Monadhliath Mountains, Scotland, United Kingdom.
A woman wearing a flimsy (adjective sense 1.1) skirt.
A British Army soldier refuelling a Crusader tank from a flimsy (noun sense 4) in October 1942 during the North African Campaign.

The origin of the adjective is uncertain; it is possibly from flim(-flam) (“(noun) false information presented as true, misinformation, nonsense; poor attempt at deception, confidence trick, pretence; (adjective) frivolous, nonsensical; deceptive; fictitious”)[1][2] or a metathesis of film (“thin layer of a substance; slender thread”) + -sy (suffix forming adjectives and nouns).[3]

The noun[3] and verb[4] are derived from the noun. Noun sense 4 (“metal container”) refers to the fact that the containers often split along their seams and leaked.

Pronunciation

Adjective

flimsy (comparative flimsier or more flimsy, superlative flimsiest or most flimsy)

  2. Likely to bend or break under pressure; easily damaged; frail, unsubstantial. [from 18th c.]
    Synonyms: fragile, shaky, weak
    Antonyms: robust, strong, sturdy, unflimsy
    He expected the flimsy structure to collapse at any moment.
    2. Of clothing: very light and thin.
      Synonyms: diaphanous, filmy, gossamer, gossamer-thin, gossamery
      • 1813, Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Canto V”, in Queen Mab; […], London: […] P. B. Shelley, […], →OCLC, page 60:
        Compelled, by its deformity, to screen / With flimsy veil of justice and of right, / Its unattractive lineaments, that scare / All, save the brood of ignorance: […]
        A figurative use.
      • 2016, Mike Scantlebury, chapter 12, in Prince William (at Olympics 2012) (Amelia Hartliss Mysteries; 3), [Morrisville, N.C.]: Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 203:
        She was wearing the flimsiest blouse and faded jeans.
  3. (figurative)
    1. Of an argument, explanation, etc.: ill-founded, unconvincing, weak; also, unimportant; paltry, trivial. [from 18th c.]
      Synonyms: feeble, unfounded, unsubstantiated
      Antonyms: well-founded, substantiated
      a flimsy excuse    the flimsiest of theories
      • 1735 January 13 (Gregorian calendar; indicated as 1734), [Alexander] Pope, An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot, London: […] J[ohn] Wright for Lawton Gilliver […], →OCLC, page 5, lines 87–90:
        VVho ſhames a Scribler? break one cobvveb thro', / He ſpins the ſlight, ſelf-pleaſing thread anevv; / Deſtroy his Fib, or Sophiſtry; in vain, / The Creature's at his dirty vvork again; / Thron'd in the Centre of his thin deſigns; / Proud of a vaſt Extent of flimzy lines.
        The scribbler is likened to a spider, and the lines he writes to flimsy threads of cobwebs.
      • 1765, William Blackstone, “Of the King, and His Title”, in Commentaries on the Laws of England, book I (Of the Rights of Persons), Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] Clarendon Press, →OCLC, page 194:
        And hovvever flimzey this title, and thoſe of VVilliam Rufus [William II of England] and Stephen of Blois [Stephen, King of England], may appear at this diſtance to us, after the lavv of deſcents hath novv been ſettled for ſo many centuries, they vvere ſufficient to puzzle the underſtandings of our brave, but unlettered, anceſtors.
    2. Of a person: lacking depth of character or understanding; frivolous, superficial. [from 19th c.]
      Synonyms: flighty, silly, trifling, unserious
      Antonyms: serious, thoughtful
      • 1827, [Walter Scott], chapter XIII, in Chronicles of the Canongate; […], volume II (The Surgeon’s Daughter), Edinburgh: […] [Ballantyne and Co.] for Cadell and Co.; London: Simpkin and Marshall, →OCLC, page 305:
        "Yes, fell woman," answered Middlemas; "but was it I who encouraged the young tyrant's outrageous passion for a portrait, or who formed the abominable plan of placing the original within his power?" / "No—for to do so required brain and wit. But it was thine, flimsy villain, to execute the device which a bolder genius planned; it was thine to entice the woman to this foreign shore, under pretence of a love, which, on thy part, cold-blooded miscreant, never had existed."
      • 1847, Leigh Hunt, “Duchess of St. Albans [Harriet Mellon], and Marriages from the Stage”, in Men, Women, and Books; a Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs, […], volume I, London: Smith, Elder and Co., […] , →OCLC, page 195:
        Poor, flimsy, wise, foolish, aristocratical, old-bachelor Horace Walpole, is shocked at his nephew [George Walpole, 3rd Earl of Orford?] marrying an actress who brought him good children, […]
    3. (obsolete) Of a person, their physical makeup, or their health: delicate, frail. [18th c.]
      • 1742 January 18 (date written; Gregorian calendar), Horace Walpole, “Letter XVIII”, in Lord Dover [i.e., George Agar-Ellis, 1st Baron Dover], editor, Letters of Horace Walpole Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann, British Envoy at the Court of Tuscany. […], volume I, London: Richard Bentley […], published 1833, →OCLC, page 72:
        […] I have a very flimsy constitution, consequently the young women won't taste my wit, and it is a long while before wit makes its own way in the world; especially, as I never prove it, by assuring people that I have it by me.

Derived terms

Translations

Noun

flimsy (countable and uncountable, plural flimsies) (dated or historical)

  1. A thing which is ill-founded, unconvincing, or weak.
  3. (also attributive, uncountable) Thin typing paper used together with carbon paper in a typewriter to make multiple copies of a document; (countable) a sheet of such paper.
    • 1872, [Walter Besant, James Rice], chapter 8, in Ready-money Mortiboy. A Matter-of-fact Story. […], volume II, London: Tinsley Brothers, […], →OCLC, pages 125–126:
      “‘Pray, miss,’ he said, ‘do not interrupt me. I represent the Press. The Fourth Estate, miss. I’m afraid I shan’t have enough flimsy.’ “Those were his very words, Kate. By flimsy, I learn that he meant writing paper. Do our great poets—does my adored [Alfred, Lord] Tennyson write on ‘flimsy?’[”]
    • 1916, John Buchan, “A Mission is Proposed”, in Greenmantle, London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC, page 1:
      I had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got Bullivant's telegram. […] I flung him the flimsy with the blue strip pasted down on it, and he whistled.
    • 1930, Dorothy L[eigh] Sayers, chapter XIV, in Strong Poison, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, published April 1967, →ISBN, page 118:
      She dragged the cover off the typewriter with sound and fury, jerked the desk-drawers till they slammed against the drawer-stops, shook the top-sheet carbons and flimsies together as a terrier shakes a rat, and attacked the machine tempestuously.
    • 1960, Nevil Shute [pseudonym; Nevil Shute Norway], chapter 3, in Trustee from the Toolroom, London; Melbourne, Vic.: William Heinemann, →OCLC, page 47:
      'I told you that I had an answer to that cable, Mr Stewart,' he said directly. 'I'm afraid it isn't very satisfactory.' He passed the flimsy to Keith, who could not read it without the steel-rimmed spectacles he always had to use for close work.
    • 1977, John le Carré [pseudonym; David John Moore Cornwell], The Honourable Schoolboy, London: Hodder and Stoughton, →ISBN, page 274:
      Smiley peered once more at the flimsy which he still clutched in his pudgy hand.
  4. (by extension) A document printed or typed on such paper.
    1. (naval slang, countable) A service certificate.
      • 1964 August 13, John [Armstrong] Spicer, Commissioner, “Officers Principally Concerned”, in Report of Royal Commissioner on Loss of H.M.A.S. “Voyager” (Papers Presented to Parliament; XIII), Canberra, A.C.T: [F]or the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia by A. J. Arthur, Commonwealth Government printer, →OCLC, page 3:
        A perusal of the comments of officers under whom he [Captain Duncan Herbert Stevens] has served as recorded in his “flimsies" indicates that he has almost consistently received high commendation for his service.
      • 1994, John Wells, “The Community of the Mid-Victorian Navy”, in The Royal Navy: An Illustrated Social History 1870–1982, Stroud, Gloucestershire; Dover, N.H.: Alan Sutton Publishing in association with the Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth, →ISBN, page 7:
        Regulations required a commanding officer to render annual confidential reports on the character and ability of his officers – with particular reference to sobriety – on forms known as ‘flimsies’.
    2. (slang, countable) A banknote; (uncountable) paper money.
    3. (newspapers, uncountable) The text to be set into pages of magazines, newspapers, etc.; copy.
      • 1859, George Augustus Sala, “Five o’Clock a.m.—The Publication of the ‘Times’ Newspaper”, in Twice Round the Clock; or The Hours of the Day and Night in London. […], London: Houlston and Wright, […], →OCLC, pages 31 and 34:
        [page 31] Sub-editors are now hard at work cutting down "flimsy," ramming sheets of "copy" on files, endlessly conferring with perspiring foremen. […] [page 34] The last report from the late debate in the Commons has come in; the last paragraph of interesting news, dropped into the box by a stealthy penny-a-liner, has been eliminated from a mass of flimsy on its probation, and for the most part rejected; […]
  6. (UK, military slang) A hexahedral metal container with a capacity of four imperial gallons (about 18 litres) used by the British Army during World War II to hold fuel.
    • 2008, Steven Pressfield, chapter 10, in Killing Rommel […], New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, →ISBN, page 98:
      But the Q[uartermaster] has ballsed-up T3 patrol's fuel ration; instead of jerry cans we get "flimsies," the notorious four-gallon containers made of metal so thin you can practically puncture it with a fingernail. Flimsies come two to a case, packed in cardboard. Of seventy-six that Collier's crew take down from the Mack, twenty-one are leaking at the seams; eleven have drained half to nil.

Derived terms

Translations

text to be set into pages of magazines, newspapers, etc. — see copy

Verb

flimsy (third-person singular simple present flimsies, present participle flimsying, simple past and past participle flimsied) (transitive)

  1. To make (something) likely to be easily damaged.
    • 1926 February 21, “Feminist furor: Three Kingdoms. By Storm Jameson. 365 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. [book review]”, in The New York Times (Book review section), New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 8, column 5:
      Its method may be roughly said to be the invention, at all events for the main characters in their novels, of a psychology so tortuous and devious that its fantastic contours cannot be fitted into any single act or situation of or in life without an elaborate apparatus of dissertation. The artistic disadvantages of the method are many. One, and perhaps the chief, is a weakening—a "flimsying" of the structure because a proper proportion of the obvious, which is the thews and sinews of fiction, has, perforce, to be left out.
    • 1981, James Nathan Miller, “Buying and Selling at the Pentagon”, in Marc Holzer, Ellen Doree Rosen, editors, Current Cases in Public Administration, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, →ISBN, section IV (Human Behavior), page 184:
      [W]hen he [A[rthur] Ernest Fitzgerald] tried to check reports that Lockheed was seriously "flimsying" the plane's construction, he received an angry call from Pentagon brass warning him, in effect, to keep out of engineering matters.
    • 2003, “Facing the Challenges of Time and Place [5.57: On Coming Home from Kampuchea]”, in This We Can Say: Australian Quaker Life, Faith and Thought, Kenmore, Qld.: Faith and Practice Committee, Australia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), published 2004, →ISBN, page 280:
      Cry for the travesties of homes that now squat meagre on wide concrete bases, / flimsied in palm-leaf. They will not last, but they will have to do in the thin hungry scrabble to survive.
  2. (dated or historical) To type or write (text) on a flimsy (“sheet of thin typing paper used together with carbon paper in a typewriter to make multiple copies of a document”) (noun sense 2).
    • 1895 November, Frank Banfield, “Interviewing in Practice”, in The National Review, volume XXVI, number 153, London: Edward Arnold, […], →OCLC, page 368:
      An interview is not a speech. […] If a man wants to publish an allocution of this kind, he should write it out and give it to me, or anyone else—a newsagency for example—and it will be "flimsied" to most of our English daily papers, whose conductors would, of course, use their own discretion as to how much or how little of it they would use. But in no sense of the word could such a performance be properly classified under the heading of the interview.
    • 1904 June 16, [Robert Wallace] Best, chairman and questioner, William Chessell, witness, “Select Committee. Privilege: Case of Senator Lt.-Col. [John Cash] Neild. Minutes of Evidence.”, in Journals of the Senate and Printed Papers having Special Reference to the Senate, volume I, [Canberra, A.C.T]: [F]or the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia by Rob[er]t S. Brain, Government Printer for the State of Victoria, published 1904, →OCLC, paragraphs 908–910, page 79:
      Did you, as a matter of fact, receive pages 55 and 56 at the same time?—I cannot say that I did. / But if you had received them?—I should have flimsied them with this. / As they are not flimsied, what do you say?—All I can presume is that they were not there. I should not have separated one paper from the other, and flimsied one and left the other.
    • 1907 June 22, “Notes of the week”, in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, volume 103, number 2,695, London: […] Reginald Webster Page, […], →OCLC, page 765, column 2:
      […] Mr. Spencer Hughes, the Liberal, is accusing the Independent Labour men of being "blacklegs." Some of them, it seems, have been doing the work of two or three journalists in the House, flimsying and syndicating London Letters and Labour articles and notes in a number of newspapers. Cannot they be peacefully persuaded to attend to their own work, and leave journalism to journalists?
    • 1923, Henry Lucy, chapter XIX, in The Diary of a Journalist: Fresh Extracts, volume III, London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, page 179:
      I [Phil May] lived down Brixton way and made a precarious living by flimsying news paragraphs and personally delivering copies at the newspaper offices. Sometimes they were used in full, occasionally they were ruthlessly cut down to a few lines; often they went direct to the waste-paper basket.
  3. (figurative) To treat (someone or something) as paltry or unimportant; to demean, to underestimate.
    • 2008, Jill Stephenson, “Out of Order”, in One Life Passes for Another, [Bloomington, Ind.]: Xlibris, →ISBN, section 8, page 272:
      What she sacrificed in energy, emotion and integrity, diminished her rather than excelled. […] Teri suddenly saw herself flimsied by bargains she had negotiated too readily.

Translations

References

  1. ^ “flim-flam, n. and adj.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2024; “flimflam, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
  2. ^ “flimsy, adj. and n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Compare “flimsy, adj. and n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2024.
  4. ^ “flimsy, v.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2024.

Further reading

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