Adjective

(er)

Gentle and not easily provoked.

(of a rule or punishment) Of only moderate severity.

Not keenly felt or seriously intended.

*

, title=(The Celebrity), chapter=8 , passage=I corralled the judge, and we started off across the fields, in no very mild state of fear of that gentleman's wife, whose vigilance was seldom relaxed. And thus we came by a circuitous route to Mohair, the judge occupied by his own guilty thoughts, and I by others not less disturbing.}}

(of an illness or pain) Not serious or dangerous.

* {{quote-book, author=Rachel Simon, year=2002

, passage=I learn that mental retardation is classified in four levels: mild , moderate, severe, and profound. , title= Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey}}

* {{quote-book, author=Janice A. Gault, year=2003

, passage=NPDR can be further classified as mild , moderate, severe, or very severe, which can help predict how quickly the patient may progress to proliferative (neovascular) diabetic retinopathy (PDR). , title= Ophthalmology Pearls}}

(of weather) Moderately warm, especially less cold than expected.

(of a medicine or cosmetic) Acting gently and without causing harm.

Not sharp, or strong in flavor.

Adjective

(en adjective)

Capable of being easily led, taught, or managed; docile; manageable; governable.

* 1792 , , A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , ch. 13:

I have always found horses, an animal I am attached to, very tractable when treated with humanity and steadiness.

* 1839 , Nicholas Nickleby , ch. 61:

Of all the tractable , equal-tempered, attached, and faithful beings that ever lived, I believe he was the most so.

* 1909 , , The Bronze Bell , ch. 18:

[T]his matter of the vanishing bridge must have been arranged in order to put him in a properly subdued and tractable frame of mind.

* 2008 , , Shadows Return , ISBN 9780553590081, p. 96:

Some masters can be quite kind if you're meek and tractable .

Capable of being shaped; malleable.

* 1866 , P. Le Neve Foster, " Report on the Art-Workmanship Prizes", reprinted in Journal of the Society of Arts , March 2, 1966:

I need not point out the advantages of modelling in a material as durable as stone. . . . Mixed up with just enough water to form a stiff paste, it accommodates itself to the touch of the modelling tool. . . . There are two inherent difficulties in using it—one, it is not so tractable as clay. . . .

(obsolete) Capable of being handled or touched; palpable; practicable; feasible; serviceable.

* 1707 , , "Moll Quarles's Answer to Mother Creswell of Famous Memory" in The Second Volume of the Works of Mr. Tho. Brown, containing Letters from the Dead to the Living both Serious and Comical , part three, page 184:

At lea?t five Hundred of the?e reforming Vultures are daily plundering our Pockets, and ran?acking our Hou?es, leaving me ?ometimes not one pair of Tractable Buttocks in my Vaulting-School to provide for my Family, or earn me ?o much as a Pudding for my next Sundays Dinner : [...]

(mathematics) Sufficiently operationalizable or useful to allow a mathematical calculation to proceed toward a solution.

* 1987 , Ira Horowitz, "Market Structure Implications of Export-Price Uncertainty," Managerial and Decision Economics , vol. 8, no. 2, p. 134:

This assumption is in the Raiffa and Schlaifer (1961, p. 72) spirit of using ‘a little ingenuity. . . to find a tractable function’ to quantify risk-preferences and probability judgments so as to make the analysis feasible.

(computer science) Of a decision problem, algorithmically solvable fast enough to be practically relevant, typically in polynomial time.