nimble
adjEtymology
From Middle English nymyl, nemel, nemyll, nymell (“agile, quick, ready, able, capable”), merger of Old English nǣmel (“receptive, quick to grasp”) and Old English numol (“able to take, capable of holding”), both from niman (“to take”) + -el, -ol (associative suffix), corresponding to nim + -le. Compare German nehmen, Gothic 𐌽𐌹𐌼𐌰𐌽 (niman), Old Norse nema (“to take”). More at nim.
- inherited from nymyl
Definitions
Adept at taking or grasping.
- nimble fingers
Quick and light in movement or action.
- He was too nimble for the assailant and easily escaped his grasp.
- Attempts to introduce versions of "market communism" — in China, Hungary or Yugoslavia — have shown how hard it is to make mainly state-owned economies as nimble as mainly private ones.
Quickwitted and alert.
- He has a nimble mind and can improvise in any situation.
- "It requires you to be flexible and nimble in your thinking and Huw has already demonstrated that," said Greenwood, [...]
›+ 1 more definitionshow fewer
To move nimbly.
- Their teeth are regularly and assiduously cleaned by shrimp that nimble in and out of the moray's mouth like ballet dancers in the jaws of a mechanical stage dragon.
The neighborhood
- antonymsluggishantonym(s) of “quick and light in movement or action”
Vish — recursive loop
A definitional loop anchored at nimble. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.
A definitional loop anchored at nimble. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.
10 hops · closes at nimble
curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA