The DICT Development Group
5 definitions found
for flaky
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 :
Flaky \Flak"y\, a.
1. Consisting of flakes or of small, loose masses; lying, or
cleaving off, in flakes or layers; flakelike.
[1913 Webster]
What showers of mortal hail, what flaky fires!
--Watts.
[1913 Webster]
A flaky weight of winter's purest snows.
--Wordsworth.
[1913 Webster]
2. prone to strange or erratic behavior; -- of persons.
[PJC]
3. odd, unpredictable or unconventional; offbeat; whacky; --
of behavior.
[PJC]
4. unpredictable, erratic, or unreliable; -- of machinery,
especially electronic devices. "a flaky computer board."
[PJC]
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) :
flaky
adj 1: made of or resembling flakes; "flaky soap" [syn: flaky,
flakey]
2: made of or easily forming flakes [syn: flaky, flakey]
3: conspicuously or grossly unconventional or unusual;
"restaurants of bizarre design--one like a hat, another like
a rabbit"; "famed for his eccentric spelling"; "a freakish
combination of styles"; "his off-the-wall antics"; "the
outlandish clothes of teenagers"; "outre and affected stage
antics" [syn: bizarre, eccentric, freakish, freaky,
flaky, flakey, gonzo, off-the-wall, outlandish,
outre]
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 :
173 Moby Thesaurus words for "flaky":
abnormal, anomalous, apish, arbitrary, asinine, asperous, balmy,
bananas, barmy, bats, batty, beany, befooled, beguiled, besotted,
bonkers, brainless, branny, buffoonish, buggy, bughouse, bugs,
capricious, chalklike, chalky, cockeyed, comminute, comminuted,
crackers, crank, crankish, cranky, crazy, credulous, crotchety,
crushed, cuckoo, daffy, daft, dazed, detrital, detrited, deviant,
deviative, different, dippy, disintegrated, divergent, dizzy,
doting, dotty, dumb, dusty, eccentric, efflorescent, erratic,
exceptional, fanciful, fantasied, fantastic, farinaceous,
fatuitous, fatuous, fey, fine, flipped, flocculent, floury, fond,
fool, foolheaded, foolish, freaked-out, freakish, fruitcakey,
fruity, fuddled, funny, furfuraceous, futile, gaga, gone to dust,
goofy, grated, ground, gulled, harebrained, haywire, humorsome,
idiocratic, idiosyncratic, idiotic, imbecile, impalpable, inane,
inept, infatuated, insane, irregular, just plain nuts, kinky,
kooky, lentiginous, lepidote, levigated, loony, loopy, mad,
maggoty, maudlin, mealy, milled, moody, moronic, motiveless,
notional, nuts, nutty, odd, oddball, off the hinges, off the track,
off the wall, peculiar, pestled, petulant, potty, powdered,
powdery, pulverant, pulverized, pulverulent, queer, quirky,
reduced to powder, round the bend, sappy, scabby, scabious,
scabrous, scaly, scobicular, scobiform, screwball, screwballs,
screwy, scurfy, senseless, sentimental, sharded, shredded, silly,
singular, slaphappy, squamous, strange, stupid, temperamental,
thoughtless, triturated, twisted, unconventional, unnatural,
unreasonable, unrestrained, vagarious, vagrant, wacky, wanton,
wayward, wet, whimsical, witless
From The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003) :
flaky
adj.
(var sp. flakey) Subject to frequent lossage. This use is of course
related to the common slang use of the word to describe a person as
eccentric, crazy, or just unreliable. A system that is flaky is working,
sort of ? enough that you are tempted to try to use it ? but fails
frequently enough that the odds in favor of finishing what you start are
low. Commonwealth hackish prefers dodgy or wonky.
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018) :
flaky
(Or "flakey") Subject to frequent lossage. This use is of
course related to the common slang use of the word to describe
a person as eccentric, crazy, or just unreliable. A system
that is flaky is working, sort of - enough that you are
tempted to try to use it - but fails frequently enough that
the odds in favour of finishing what you start are low.
Commonwealth hackish prefers dodgy.
[{Jargon File]
(1996-01-05)
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