lax
Pronunciation: /laks/
adjective
- 1not sufficiently strict, severe, or careful: lax security arrangements at the airport he’d been a bit lax about discipline in school lately
- 2(of the limbs or muscles) relaxed: muscles have more potential energy when they are stretched than when they are lax
- (of the bowels) loose.
- Phonetics (of a speech sound, especially a vowel) pronounced with the vocal muscles relaxed: The opposite of tense1. the merger of tense and lax vowels before ‘l’
Origin:
late Middle English (in the sense 'loose', said of the bowels): from Latin laxus