flabby
Americanadjective
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hanging loosely or limply, as flesh or muscles; flaccid.
-
having such flesh.
-
lacking strength or determination.
adjective
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lacking firmness; loose or yielding
flabby muscles
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having flabby flesh, esp through being overweight
-
lacking vitality; weak; ineffectual
Other Word Forms
- flabbily adverb
- flabbiness noun
Etymology
Origin of flabby
1690–1700; apparently expressive alteration of earlier flappy, with same sense; flap, -y 1; compare late Middle English flabband (attested once), evidently with sense “flapping”
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Meanwhile the narrator’s financially devious husband appears as a vulture with “the brooding eye, the blood-tipped beak, the flabby folds of flesh” of a bird of prey.
From The Wall Street Journal • Oct. 24, 2025
In a speech last week Sir Keir Starmer promised to make the "flabby" state more efficient and cut bureaucracy.
From BBC • Mar. 17, 2025
When we need the churning dread of an intimate tale of generational trauma, “The Marsh King’s Daughter” goes formulaic, and when we’re primed for exploitation sweats, it gets flabby.
From Los Angeles Times • Nov. 3, 2023
When the anthology film “Twilight Zone: The Movie” opened on June 24, 1983, reviews were mixed; The New York Times’s Vincent Canby deemed it “a flabby, mini-minded behemoth,” and that was a fairly representative view.
From New York Times • Jun. 25, 2023
She had small piggy eyes, a sunken mouth, and one of those white flabby faces that looked exactly as though it had been boiled.
From "James and the Giant Peach" by Roald Dahl
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
