weak

Adjective

1. Lacking in force (usually strength) or ability.
   • The child was too weak to move the boulder.
   • They easily guessed his weak computer password.
   • a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man - c. 1603–1606, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of King Lear”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and...
2. Unable to sustain a great weight, pressure, or strain.
   • a weak timber; a weak rope
3. Limp, soft.
4. Unable to withstand temptation, urgency, persuasion, etc.; easily impressed, moved, or overcome; accessible; vulnerable.
   • weak resolutions; weak virtue
   • Guard thy heart / On this weak side, where most our nature fails. - 1703, Nicholas Rowe, The Fair Penitent, act I, scene I:
5. Having a strong, irrepressible emotional love for someone or (less often) something; sentimentally affected by such love.
   • 'Cause sugar pie, honey bunch You know that I'm weak for you Can't help myself I love you and nobody else - 2065 April 23, “I Can't Help Myself”, in Four Tops Second Album, performed by The Four Tops:
   • It’s really good to hear your voice Sayin' my name, it sounds so sweet Comin' from the lips of an angel Hearin' those words, it makes me weak - 2006 April 3, “Lips Of An Angel”, in Extreme Behavior, performed by Hinder:
6. Dilute, lacking in taste or potency.
   • That the young Mr. Churchills liked—but they did not like him coming round of an evening and drinking weak whisky-and-water while he held forth on railway debentures and corporation loans. Mr. Barrett, however, by...
   • We were served stale bread and weak tea.
7. Displaying a particular kind of inflection, including:
   • The verb to walk is weak because it has a past tense of walked and all forms are inflected by adding the typical suffix (ie is regular) to the stem walk- (ie has no vowel changes).
   • The verb to run is strong, not weak, because the past tense is ran.
   • The verb to be is neither weak nor strong, instead it is highly irregular in all inflections; its third person present tense is is instead of *bes (which can even be seen in this very sentence) and its past tense is was...

   Antonyms: strong

   Coordinate Terms: strong irregular

   1. (Germanic languages, of verbs) Regular in inflection, lacking vowel changes and having a past tense marked by /-d-/, /-t-/, or /-ð-/.

   2. (Germanic languages, of nouns) Showing less distinct grammatical endings.

      Antonyms: strong

   3. (Germanic languages, of adjectives) Definite in meaning, often used with a definite article or similar word.

      Antonyms: strong

   4. (Semitic languages) Related to, containing, or being a consonant which is prone to disappearing in some inflections, in most applicable languages including (but not limited to) w and y.

      • In some Semitic languages such as Akkadian, some or all gutturals are weak and often disappear, but in others such as Arabic and Ugaritic, they are strong and never disappear.
      • The reflexes of the Proto-Semitic verb *mawut- (“to die”) are often weak due to the presence of w, for example: Arabic مَاتَ (māta), Hebrew מֵת (mēṯ), and Ugaritic 𐎎𐎚 (mt /⁠māta⁠/).

      Antonyms: strong

   5. (Uralic languages) Related to, being, or containing the lenis consonant gradation, which resulted from historically closed syllables.

      • The Finnish verb kääntää (“to translate”) inflects to the singular imperative as käännä, showing the weak gradation nt > nn because it historically ended in a consonant which closed the syllable.

      Antonyms: strong

8. Of a form in which the accent tends to shift forwards (to the right, in transcription) or did so ancestrally in Proto-Indo-European, relative to the strong stem (which has the leftmost accent allowed).
   • Paradigmatic slots in which the accent and correlating e-grade are positioned further to the left of the word are traditionally termed strong, those with accent and e-grade further to the right, are called weak. In all...
   • The PIE zero grade was most often found in weak stems, such as in *mn̥téys (“of thought, from thinking”, genitive/ablative singular of *méntis) and *mn̥yóh₂er (“I am thinking”). Over time it spread to strong stems, i.e....

   Antonyms: strong

   1. (of nouns and adjectives) In a grammatical case other than nominative, accusative, vocative or sometimes locative singular.

      Antonyms: strong

   2. (of verbs) In a conjugation other than singular active forms (regardless of person, tense etc.).

      • All middle forms of Indo-European verbs are traditionally weak. Middle-only verbs can still be compared to hypothetical strong stems, such as weak *ǵn̥h₁-yé- (e.g. *ǵn̥h₁yéto, “(he/she/it) was born”) versus strong...

      Antonyms: strong

9. Lenis, pronounced with less force or less markedness.
10. That does not ionize completely into anions and cations in a solution.
    • a weak acid
    • a weak base
    • When we say that an acid is weak, we refer only to its degree of dissociation, not to its degree of corrosiveness; but it is true that those two traits often correlate, though.
11. One of the four fundamental forces associated with nuclear decay.
12. Bad or uncool.
    • This place is weak.