flabby

adj

Etymology: From a variant of flappy, from flap (“to hang loose”). Compare English dialectal flapsy (“flabby”), Middle Dutch flabbe (“a slap in the face; a fan-blade; a hair ribbon; a wagging tongue”), Middle Low German flabbe (“a gaping mouth; a chatterbox”), Danish flab (“the jaw; cheeks; a malapert”), Swedish flabb, fläff (“the hanging underlip of an animal; guffaw; driveller”), German Flabbe (“a gob; muzzle”).

1. Yielding to the touch, and easily moved or shaken; hanging loose by its own weight; lacking firmness; flaccid.

   “My attention was accidentally drawn to this aid, some five or six years ago, while attending a lady (multipara) in her confinement, who suffered from umbilical hernia, with large flabby abdomen.”

   “A neglected gap was all the gate it had, and the first glance at the place was enough to let you see the flabby devil was running that show.”

2. Having a slight lack of acidity; having mild sweetness.

   “A flabby wine might be described as a wine in which nothing stands out.”

   “An extremely hot region will give you flabby wine.”

3. overwrought.

   “As you revise, focus on eliminating flabby expressions. This takes conscious effort. As one expert copyeditor observed, “Trim sentences, like trim bodies, usually require far more effort than flabby ones.”

4. Which forms a surjection from the domain to every open subset of the codomain.

   “a flabby sheaf on a paracompact space”