Definition of "graceful"

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.

1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 1, in The China Governess‎

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.

2009, Dale Liu, Cisco Router and Switch Forensics