Definition of "frail"

Returne with ſpeed, time paſſeth ſwift away,Our life is fraile, and we may dye to day.

c. 1587–1588, [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592; reprinted as Tamburlaine the Great (A Scolar Press Facsimile), Menston, Yorkshire, London: Scolar Press, 1973, (please specify the page)

Its nest is composed of the frailest materials, and is light and small in proportion to the size of the bird

1831, John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography: Volume 1: Blue-grey Fly-catcher

Frail smoke of morning in the air and a sort of muffled hum that is not sound but is not silence either.

1993, John Banville, Ghosts

O as the soft and frail lights break upon your eyelids

1922, Isaac Rosenberg, Dawn

She was the roughest, toughest frail, but Minnie had a heart as big as a whale.

1931, Cab Calloway, Irving Mills, Minnie the Moocher

There were five people in the Quirinal bar after dinner, a high-class Italian frail who sat on a stool making persistent conversation against the bartender's bored: “Si … Si … Si,” a light, snobbish Egyptian who was lonely but chary of the woman, and the two Americans.

1934, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night: A Romance, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons; republished as chapter X, in Malcolm Cowley, editor, Tender is the Night: A Romance [...] With the Author’s Final Revisions, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, book IV (Escape: 1925–1929), page 238

‘She's pickin' 'em tonight, right on the nose,’ he said. ‘That tall black-headed frail.’

1939, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Penguin, published 2011, page 148

Sullivan, the girl and the butler get to the ground. The girl wears a turtle-neck sweater, a cap slightly sideways, a torn coat, turned-up pants and sneakers.SULLIVAN Why don't you go back with the car... You look about as much like a boy as Mae West.THE GIRL All right, they'll think I'm your frail.

1941, Preston Sturges, “Sullivan's Travels”, in Five Screenplays, page 77

The scythe, the sickle and the flail (or "frail", is it is invariably called) - these should surely be incorporated in the county arms, for on their use much of the prosperity of Essex has always rested until now.

1948, C. Henry Warren, The English Counties, Essex, Odhams, p. 170