Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Characterized by quickness, lightness, and ease of movement; nimble.
  • adjective Mentally quick or alert.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Nimble; having the faculty of quick motion; apt or ready to move; brisk; active: said of the mind as well as of the body.
  • Synonyms Nimble, Agile (see nimble), quick, lively, alert, supple, spry.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Having the faculty of quick motion in the limbs; apt or ready to move; nimble; active

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Having the faculty of quick motion in the limbs; apt or ready to move; nimble; active; as, an agile boy; an agile tongue.
  • adjective computing Of or relating to Agile software development, a technique for iterative and incremental development of software involving collaboration between teams.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective mentally quick
  • adjective moving quickly and lightly

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French, from Latin agilis, from agere, to drive, do; see ag- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French agile, from Latin agilis ("agile, nimble"), from agō ("do, act; move"). See agent.

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Examples

  • - "Ok, so you don't like the term agile … but I'm more than happy to use it to describe what I see is way forward for GIS mapping."

    Planet Geospatial 2008

  • Throwing the term agile into any title and leading statement is fodder for dissenting options.

    Planet Geospatial 2008

  • We decide to use the term agile to describe this new breed of, setting out the values and principles of these agile processes.

    Martin Fowler's Bliki 2009

  • It's closely related to what they call agile (or rapid) program development.

    Entrepreneur.com: Latest Articles 2010

  • I was only challenging the Blogger to his "Agile Mapping" title and the first line of information that suggested that with this example we were to conclude "agile mapping is where we need to be" … Throwing the term agile into any title and leading statement is fodder for dissenting options.

    Planet Geospatial 2008

  • Another level could be called "agile big data," whose concern is solving a different class of problems and allows more experimentation.

    Forbes.com: News Dan Woods 2011

  • The terms agile or waterfall tend to be used rather than any mention of Toyota (although I am aware of one source that talks about kanban software development) but the concepts of managing by walking around, standardized work, the worker stopping the assembly line, the extended supplier community supplying parts just in time and so forth sounds a lot like community forums, rapid application development,

    SeekingAlpha.com: Home Page Dennis Byron 2010

  • The terms agile or waterfall tend to be used rather than any mention of Toyota (although I am aware of one source that talks about kanban software development) but the concepts of managing by walking around, standardized work, the worker stopping the assembly line, the extended supplier community supplying parts just in time and so forth sounds a lot like community forums, rapid application development,

    Software Sector and Stocks Analysis from Seeking Alpha 2010

  • The terms agile or waterfall tend to be used rather than any mention of Toyota (although I am aware of one source that talks about kanban software development) but the concepts of managing by walking around, standardized work, the worker stopping the assembly line, the extended supplier community supplying parts just in time and so forth sounds a lot like community forums, rapid application development,

    SeekingAlpha.com: Home Page 2010

  • The terms agile or waterfall tend to be used rather than any mention of Toyota (although I am aware of one source that talks about kanban software development) but the concepts of managing by walking around, standardized work, the worker stopping the assembly line, the extended supplier community supplying parts just in time and so forth sounds a lot like community forums, rapid application development,

    Software Sector and Stocks Analysis from Seeking Alpha Dennis Byron 2010

Comments

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  • The basketball players are very agile.

    March 30, 2007

  • also a project management approach for software development

    May 14, 2009

  • "With an agile and intensely active brain few writers have combined a greater disposition to extreme bodily indolence"

    Source: The times Literary supplement

    January 22, 2018