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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



... look for the delicate apprehension and tact, which can only be formed in a highly polished state of society, nor for the indignation of insulted morality expressed by the ancients: it is altogether a caricature, not of finished individual portraits, but of a single type;—a clownish sensual German ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various

... us by the sword, and by the sword we shall answer! You are too delicate for us, Alexis. There should be none here but men whose hands are rough with ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde

... merely stimulated his ambition. He was really a merry creature, and when he had got off a number of very good things which were received in perfect silence, and looked over his audience with a woe-begone eye, and said, with an effect of delicate apology, 'I hope I'm not disturbing you any,' I broke down and laughed, and that delivered me into his hand. He immediately said to me that now he would tell me about a friend of his, who had a pretty large family, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... briefly all the cases known to me of male quadrupeds differing in colour from the females. With Marsupials, as I am informed by Mr. Gould, the sexes rarely differ in this respect; but the great red kangaroo offers a striking exception, "delicate blue being the prevailing tint in those parts of the female which in the male are red." (19. Osphranter rufus, Gould, 'Mammals of Australia,' 1863, vol. ii. On the Didelphis, Desmarest, 'Mammalogie,' p. 256.) In the Didelphis ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... pipe rather fiercely, in some contempt at this trivial discussion. He had no ear for music himself, and never went to church, as being of the medical profession, and likely to be in requisition for delicate cows. But the butcher, having music in his soul, had listened with a divided desire for Tookey's defeat and for the preservation of ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot


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