(a.) Addicted to pleasure; luxurious; voluptuous; alluring.
(a.) Pleasing to the senses; refinedly agreeable; hence, adapted to please a nice or cultivated taste; nice; fine; elegant; as, a delicate dish; delicate flavor.
(a.) Slight and shapely; lovely; graceful; as, "a delicate creature."
(a.) Fine or slender; minute; not coarse; -- said of a thread, or the like; as, delicate cotton.
(a.) Slight or smooth; light and yielding; -- said of texture; as, delicate lace or silk.
(a.) Soft and fair; -- said of the skin or a surface; as, a delicate cheek; a delicate complexion.
(a.) Light, or softly tinted; -- said of a color; as, a delicate blue.
(a.) Refined; gentle; scrupulous not to trespass or offend; considerate; -- said of manners, conduct, or feelings; as, delicate behavior; delicate attentions; delicate thoughtfulness.
(a.) Tender; not able to endure hardship; feeble; frail; effeminate; -- said of constitution, health, etc.; as, a delicate child; delicate health.
(a.) Requiring careful handling; not to be rudely or hastily dealt with; nice; critical; as, a delicate subject or question.
(a.) Of exacting tastes and habits; dainty; fastidious.
(a.) Nicely discriminating or perceptive; refinedly critical; sensitive; exquisite; as, a delicate taste; a delicate ear for music.
(a.) Affected by slight causes; showing slight changes; as, a delicate thermometer.
(n.) A choice dainty; a delicacy.
(n.) A delicate, luxurious, or effeminate person.
Example Sentences:
(1) Even if it does not always provide the solution to a particularly delicate problem, which is often of vital importance, it provides data which, modifiable and better used, should provide an adequate notion of the anatomical and physiopathological state in aortic stenosis.
(2) A layer of thick and dense delicate filament-like substance was attached to the surface of the cell body of Cp in the ultrathin sections with ruthenium red staining, in the case of Cj only a little of such a substance could be noted.
(3) For a while North Korea refused to play, but after delicate negotiations the players were persuaded back on to the pitch and the correct flag was displayed alongside the team photos.
(4) As one example, certain aspects of Gawain's situation seem oddly redolent of a more contemporary predicament, namely our complex and delicate relationship with the natural world.
(5) In sections of cells rich in cytoplasm, the basal bodies are particularly difficult to visualize due to their small size (25 to 45 mmicro) and the lack of properties that would enable one to distinguish them from the ribonucleoprotein structures; in addition, their boundary appears to be delicate.
(6) "These are delicate times and we take a positive role," Yi Gang, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China, told the Guardian today.
(7) Even extraembryonic membranes can form strands of tissue that can entangle the delicate developing foot plate, and calcaneovalgus deformities could conceivably be established.
(8) Through this clear indication, it could be said, that pregnancies with delicate prognosis through tocolytic therapy are possibly unnecessarily lengthened and the final result is not better.
(9) Oil is coating birds and delicate wetlands along the Louisiana coast, and the political fallout from the spill has reached Washington, where the head of the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling resigned today.
(10) Filo pastry contains very little fat itself but relies on fat being added later in between incredibly fine sheets, allowing them to separate during cooking, and so shatter in the mouth into fine delicate shards.
(11) Ultrarapid freezing, followed by delicate freeze-substitution, immobilizes and retains much more ECM than chemical fixatives that include tannic acid (TA).
(12) Ultrastructural study confirmed the diagnosis by revealing tumour cells with delicate interdigitating cytoplasmic processes and basement membrane formation resembling pericytes.
(13) The cholera toxin subunit B-containing retinal efferents were effectively stained and yielded the presence of axons with delicate boutons on passage and nerve endings.
(14) Type I cases were technically more difficult and had a slightly higher surgical morbidity than Type II cases, especially if an oblique bone septum had asymmetrically divided the cord into one larger hemicord and one smaller, hence, very delicate, hemicord.
(15) One thing that isn't the same as in 2003: the delicately balanced relations among the many communities, ethnic and religious, in this most diverse region in Iraq have not been broken again.
(16) There are many differences between full dentures on Brånemark implants and fixed partial dentures built on the same type of implants: due to some more critical anatomical conditions, the choice of number, position and length of the implants is more delicate; the need of an harmonious crown-gingival tissue relationship; higher occlusal forces than in edentalous cases; difficulty in satisfying aesthetic requirements and ease of hygiene.
(17) Tissue characteristics of this laser energy should permit the vaporization of the stapes footplate or oval window soft tissue without thermal effect to the vestibule and without passing through the perilymph to damage the delicate structures of the inner ear.
(18) David Cameron suggests that the prospect of giving prisoners the vote makes him feel physically ill. For a man with such an apparently delicate constitution, it is surprising that wilfully ignoring a succession of court rulings appears to have so little effect on him."
(19) In their hands, the work of constitutional negotiations became a delicate art.
(20) The climate of xenophobia and police brutality in Egypt has raised questions for Italian prosecutors as to whether it was appropriate for Cambridge University to allow a young foreign student to go Cairo and undertake field research into such a delicate topic.
Tenuous
Definition:
(a.) Thin; slender; small; minute.
(a.) Rare; subtile; not dense; -- said of fluids.
(a.) Lacking substance, as a tenuous argument.
Example Sentences:
(1) Diagnosis based on the character of the stridor alone is tenuous, and consideration of presentation other than the stridor is discussed in the management of these infants.
(2) Indian women are aware of our tenuous grip on our rights.
(3) Rising losses among the nearly 350,000-strong Afghan army and police, and a desertion rate of about 50,000 a year, also support Karzai's contention that control of large parts of the country remains tenuous.
(4) The results suggest that chronic sunlight exposure may be associated with an impediment to normal maturation of human dermal collagen resulting in tenuous amount of HHL.
(5) What the film does, though, is use these incidents to build an idiosyncratic but insightful picture of Lawrence, played indelibly by Peter O'Toole in his debut role: a complicated, egomaniacal and physically masochistic man, at once god-like and all too flawed, with a tenuous grip both on reality and on sanity.
(6) Because of disruption of the fasciocutaneous circulation, the perfusion of randomly based flaps is frequently tenuous.
(7) New employment data today suggested that hurricane Sandy is hurting already tenuous US job growth.
(8) Although extrapolation from animal studies may be tenuous, the present findings may explain the link between nutrition and the occurrence of alcoholic pancreatitis.
(9) If any of them is neglected or isolated from the rest, the whole will be impoverished-the student will suffocate in disconnected, empirical facts; fanciful theories will be spun from tenuous evidence; well established theory will be neglected by the practitioner; the best-intentioned schemes will have disastrous long-term consequences.
(10) However, circumstantial evidence is beginning to provide a tenuous link between smoking and the protease-antiprotease imbalance hypothesis.
(11) Though one possible mechanism for this reversal may include the inhibition of NAD-kinase by cAMP, there is evidence to suggest that such a direct cause-effect relationship is at present tenuous.
(12) We feel that tenuous attachments of the vitreous body to the fovea could exert traction on the vitreo-retinal interface or shrinkage of a fibrocellular membrane on the inner foveal surface could lead to the observations made by us.
(13) As has been long predicted by military critics of a bombing campaign, Mayville said Isis was already changing its tactics in response to the air strikes, particularly around Mt Sinjar, where on Saturday US warplanes attacked Isis positions surrounding the mountain where tens of thousands of Iraqi Yazidis have taken a tenuous refuge.
(14) In the years since the housing market bottomed out, Tremont and other pockets of Cleveland have witnessed a tenuous revitalisation thanks to newcomers seeking city lifestyles and new investment in 21st-century industry.
(15) Although the bright green light helped counteract sleepiness, any causal link with changes in melatonin output seem tenuous.
(16) America's arch enemy, Muammar Gaddafi, had thousands of troops camped in the remote desert of northern Chad, a forward front in his pan-African expansionist plan, but a thousand miles from Tripoli on tenuous supply lines and thus highly vulnerable.
(17) Data indicate that non-rehospitalization is associated with a stance of "positive withdrawal" (Corin 1990); it is characterized by a position at a distance from social roles and social relationships, combined with various strategies for keeping more tenuous links with the social environment.
(18) However, their entry into force was delayed for a "few days" according to a statement from Brussels, to leave time to assess the implementation of a tenuous ceasefire agreement in Ukraine negotiated last Friday.
(19) Although these results suggest a tenuous relationship between scrapie pathology and the integrity of neurotransmitter systems, it is possible that compensatory neurochemical changes in uncompromised neuronal populations may have masked potentially specific neurotransmitter effects.
(20) Mair’s links with far-right groups in the US and South Africa are well documented, but his associations with similar organisations closer to home appear more tenuous.