- easy
- easy adj1 *comfortable, restful, cozy, snugAnalogous words: *soft, lenient, gentle: commodious, *spacious: *calm, tranquil, serene, placid: unconstrained, spontaneous (see corresponding nouns at UNCONSTRAINT)Antonyms: disquieting or disquietedContrasted words: disturbed, perturbed, agitated, upset, discomposed (see DISCOMPOSE): anxious, worried, concerned (see under CARE n)2 Easy, facile, simple, light, effortless, smooth are comparable when meaning not involving undue effort or difficulty (as in doing, making, giving, or understanding).Easy is applicable both to persons and things that make demands for physical or mental effort or that impose a task upon a person and to the acts or activities involved in satisfying such demands or in accomplishing such a task{
the book was easy to read
}{I would like some more easy reading
}{our teacher was easy today; her assignment for tomorrow is short and easy
}{an easy riddle
}{the place is easy to reach
}{the place is within easy reach of the city
}{it will not be easy for him to understand your breaking of your promise
}{take my yoke upon you, and learn of me . . . for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light— Mt 11:29-30
}{I have been a dreamer and an artist, a great dreamer, for that is easy, not a great artist, for that is hard— Ellis
}{it was easy to sit on a camel's back without falling off, but very difficult to . . . get the best out of her— T. E. Lawrence
}Facile was once and to some extent is still used as a very close synonym of easy{having won . . . his facile victory— Froude
}{the facile modes of measurement which we now employ— Tyndaliy
}But it now chiefly applies to something which comes, or moves, or works, or gains its ends seemingly without effort or at call; it therefore is often used in derogation implying lack of constraint or restraint, undue haste, dexterity rather than meticulousness, or fluency with shallowness{a writer's facile pen
}{a woman's facile tears
}{I am not concerned with . . . offering any facile solution for so complex a problem— T. S. Eliot
}{she was a prey to shoddy, facile emotions and moods, none of which had power to impel her to any action— Rose Macaulay
}{Chrétien was a facile narrator, with little sense of the significance that might be given to the stories— H. O. Taylor
}Simple stresses ease in apprehending or understanding; it implies freedom from complication, intricacy, elaboration, or other involvements which render a thing difficult to see through{problems in arithmetic too simple to hold the interest of pupils of that age
}{true poetry, however simple it may appear on the surface, accumulates meaning every time it is read— Day Lewis
}{the English mother or the English nurse has a simpler job. She must teach her charge to start as few fights as possible and that there are rules— Mead
}Light implies an opposition to heavy in nearly all of its senses, but in the one here considered it suggests freedom from burdensomeness or from exactions that make undue or difficult demands on one{a light task
}{his work is very light
}{one generation's light reading often becomes another's heavy text— J. D. Hart
}{light punishment
}Effortless, though it carries many of the connotations characteristic of facile, suggests more the appearance of ease than actual absence of effort; often it implies mastery, skill, or artistry, and the attainment of such perfection that the movements or technique seem to involve no strain{the effortless dancing of a Pavlova
}{that effortless grace with which only a true poet can endow his work— M. O. Smith
}{a natural, effortless style
}{the swallows . . . glided in an effortless way through the busy air— Jefferies
}Smooth suggests an absence of, or the removal of, all difficulties or obstacles that makes a course or a career easy to follow or to pursue{the car sped along over the smooth road
}{floated over the expanse within, which was smooth as a young girl's brow— Melville
}{making the lives of the needy a little more smooth— Shields
}Antonyms: hardContrasted words: difficult, arduous (see HARD): exacting, *onerous, burdensome, oppressive eat, swallow, ingest, devour, consume mean to take food into the stomach through the mouth and throat.Eat, the common and ordinary term, implies the process of chewing as well as of taking into the stomach and therefore distinguishes itself from swallow, which implies merely the passing from the mouth through the throat to the stomach. Eat is often used, however, without any clear reference to chewing or swallowing{cattle do not eat meat
}{the worms have eaten into the timber
}and, especially in extended use, without implying anything but a slow, gradual process that is comparable to the biting or gnawing that precedes eating in that it wastes or wears away the substance{the waves have eaten a channel through the rocks
}{a knife eaten by rust
}{the acid eats into the metal
}In many idiomatic expressions the literal phrasing recalls the implications of the original meaning but nothing more{eat one's heart out (grieve in silence)
}{eat one's words (take back what one has said)
}Swallow basically implies the second part of the eating process{he has difficulty in swallowing
}{the tablets are to be swallowed without chewing
}More often it is used of hurried eating without proper mastication of food{he swallowed his breakfast and rushed for the train
}In extended use it implies a seizing and taking in or a being seized and taken in (as by engulfment, engrossment, or suppression){the ship was swallowed up by the sea
}{swallow one's resentment
}Ingest is a physiological term that implies a taking in through the mouth and throat into the stomach and is commonly opposed to egest{does a man dine well because he ingests the requisite number of calories?— Lippmann
}Devour throws the emphasis on greediness; it suggests intense hunger or gluttony in man and voracity in a wild animal{the tramp rapidly devoured the food that was set before him
}{they saw the tiger rushing on them as if it would devour them
}In extended use devour applies to something (as fire or disease) which destroys or wastes completely{the flames devoured the houses one by one
}{he that is in the city, famine and pestilence shall devour him— Ezek 7:15
}or to something which preys upon one as insistently as a beast or bird of prey{devoured by fear
}Sometimes, however, it approaches swallow in its reference to something which engrosses the mind, but it heightens the implications of avidity and zest in taking in{1devoured all the books on aviation that he could get
}{1devoured the scene before him
}Consume (see also WASTE, MONOPOLIZE) usually means little more than eat and drink, for which it serves as a term including both or either{whoever came late had to start with the course which the captain was then ... consuming— Heiser
}{after taking a piece of asparagus in her hand, she was deeply mortified at seeing her hostess consume the vegetable with the aid of a knife and fork— Shaw
}Very often, however, it adds to eat the implications of using up{my stock of provisions had been so long consumed that I had forgotten the flavor of pulse and maize and pumpkins and purple and sweet potatoes— Hudson
}Analogous words: *bite, champ, gnaw
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
