Adjective

(er)

Comfortable; at ease.

* , chapter=16

, title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=“[…] She takes the whole thing with desperate seriousness. But the others are all easy and jovial—thinking about the good fare that is soon to be eaten, about the hired fly, about anything.”}}

Requiring little skill or effort.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-10, volume=408, issue=8848, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= A new prescription , passage=As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one.}}

Causing ease; giving comfort, or freedom from care or labour.

Rich people live in easy circumstances.

an easy chair

Free from constraint, harshness, or formality; unconstrained; smooth.

easy''' manners; an '''easy style

* Alexander Pope

the easy vigour of a line

(informal, pejorative, of a person) Consenting readily to sex.

Not making resistance or showing unwillingness; tractable; yielding; compliant.

* Dryden

He gained their easy hearts.

* Sir Walter Scott

He is too tyrannical to be an easy monarch.

Not straitened as to money matters; opposed to tight.

The market is easy .

Adjective

(en-adj)

(uncomparable) Of, relating to, or located at or near a margin or edge; also figurative usages of location and margin (edge) .

The marginal area at the edge of the salt-marsh has its own plants.

In recent years there has been an increase in violence against marginal groups.

# Written in the margin of a book.

There were more marginal notes than text.

#* 1999 , R. I. Page, Introduction to English Runes , Boydell Press, page 198:

The early pages had marginal notes most of which were lost when rats nibbled away the manuscript edges.

# (geography) Sharing a border; geographically adjacent.

Monmouthshire is a Welsh county marginal to England.

(comparable) Determined by a small margin; having a salient characteristic determined by a small margin.

# Of a value, or having a characteristic that is of a value, that is close to being unacceptable or leading to exclusion from a group or category.

His writing ability was marginal at best.

''Having reviewed the test, there are two students below the required standard and three more who are marginal .

# (of land) Barely productive.

He farmed his marginal land with difficulty.

# (politics, chiefly, UK, Australia, NZ, of a constituency) Subject to a change in sitting member with only a small change in voting behaviour, this usually being inferred from the small winning margin of the previous election.

In Bristol West, Labour had a majority of only 1,000, so the seat is considered highly marginal this time around.

#* 2002 , Andrew Geddes, Jonathan Tonge, Labour?s Second Landslide: The British General Election 2001 , page 79,

In ‘battleground’ seats with the Conservatives, Liberal Democrat vote shares increased most in the most marginal seats.

#* 2007 , Robert Waller, Byron Criddle, The Almanac of British Politics , page 58,

In Outer London, Harrow East is now a more marginal Labour hold than Harrow West.

#* 2010 , Nick Economou, Zareh Ghazarian, Australian Politics For Dummies , unnumbered page,

The pendulum lists the seats from least marginal' to most '''marginal''' for the government on one side, and least '''marginal''' to most ' marginal for the opposition on the other side.

(economics, uncomparable) Pertaining to changes resulting from a unit increase in production or consumption of a good.