Skip to content
OneKitly

graceful

adjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɡɹeɪsfʊl//

Having or showing grace in movement, shape, or proportion.

adjective

  1. 1

    Having or showing grace in movement, shape, or proportion.

    She is a graceful dancer.

    The half-dozen pieces […] were painted white and carved with festoons of flowers, birds and cupids. […] The bed was the most extravagant piece. Its graceful cane halftester rose high towards the cornice and was so festooned in carved white wood that the effect was positively insecure, as if the great couch were trimmed with icing sugar.

  2. 2

    Magnanimous, lacking arrogance or complaint; gracious.

    The athlete's graceful acceptance of the controversial second-place finish won the admiration of the spectators.

  3. 3

    Gradual and non-disruptive.

    Bringing a system down cleanly will preserve the operating system and some log files, but again will destroy the contents of the RAM (the volatile data). Windows and Linux are two operating systems that require a graceful shutdown.

Etymology

From Middle English graceful. By surface analysis, grace + -ful.

Forms

comparative
more graceful
superlative
most graceful
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).