weak

adjective26

1. •
   not strong, or without much power or ability

   • The child was too weak to move the boulder.
   • They easily guessed his weak computer password.
2. •
   Unable to sustain a great weight, pressure, or strain.
3. •
   Limp, soft.
4. •
   Not prevalent or effective, or not felt to be prevalent; not potent; feeble.

   • Thy threats have no more strength than her weak prayers. — 1595
5. •
   Not having power to convince; not supported by force of reason or truth; unsustained.

   • The prosecution advanced a weak case.
6. •
   Unable to withstand temptation, urgency, persuasion, etc.; easily impressed, moved, or overcome; accessible; vulnerable.

   • Guard thy heart / On this weak side, where most our nature fails. — 1703
7. •
   Having a strong, irrepressible emotional love for someone or (less often) something; sentimentally affected by such love.
8. •
   Dilute, lacking in taste or potency.

   • We were served stale bread and weak tea.
9. •
   Lacking contrast.
10. •
    Tending towards lower prices.

    • a weak market; wheat is weak at present
11. •
    Resulting from, or indicating, lack of judgment, discernment, or firmness; unwise; hence, foolish.

    • If evil thence ensue, / She first his weak indulgence will accuse. — 1667
12. •
    Lacking in vigour or expression.
13. •
    (slang) Bad or uncool.

    • This place is weak.
14. •
    That does not ionize completely into anions and cations in a solution.

    • 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.
15. •
    One of the four fundamental forces associated with nuclear decay.
16. •
    Displaying a particular kind of inflection.
17. •
    Regular in inflection, lacking vowel changes and having a past tense marked by /-d-/, /-t-/, or /-ð-/.

    • 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.
18. •
    Showing less distinct grammatical endings.
19. •
    Definite in meaning, often used with a definite article or similar word.
20. •
    Having a narrow range of logical consequences; narrowly applicable. (Often contrasted with a strong statement which implies it.)
21. •
    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.
22. •
    Lenis, pronounced with less force or less markedness.
23. •
    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/).
24. •
    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).

    • 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. *mń̥tis, by processes of analogy and leveling. The full grade was persistent in the first syllable of reduplicated stative verbs: strong *tetórph₂e (“I am satisfied”), weak *tetr̥pmé (“we all are satisfied”), though for some verbs such as *pí-ph₃-e- (“to drink”) there was an unusual i-grade which may have lacked any distinct weak counterpart.
25. •
    In a grammatical case other than nominative, accusative, vocative or sometimes locative singular.
26. •
    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 *ǵénh₁-ye-.