Hawkins misplaced horns and spikes, and some of his robust four-legged dinosaurs were actually gracile bipeds. (Yannic Rack, How a Victorian Dinosaur Park Became a Time Capsule of Early Paleontology, Smithsonian Magazine, August 2023)

The bright colors and gracile X-braces of the Eames House are written all across the Pompidou Center. (Thomas de Monchaux, The Original Shock of the Pompidou Center, The New Yorker, January 2022)

Early modern humans - more gracile, and perhaps quicker to adapt and take advantage of their environment - then migrated north from Africa to outpace and outlive the first Europeans. (Tim Radford, Neanderthal DNA may account for nicotine addiction and depression, The Guardian, February 2016)

Then from the window she could see the view over the formal gardens, the spindly avenues leading to the woods, the bouquets of gracile trees, all fine cold and faint against a sky almost colourless, tinged only with a timid flush of lavender. (Marjorie Bowen, Five People)

At a touch upon her shoulder Lilly turned, spun, rather, under high tension, to encounter the well-bred hesitancy of an exceedingly slender woman, a very small head set on the stem of a long, gracile neck, something hauntingly familiar in the somewhat heart-shaped face and the far-apart eyes that were considerably younger than the white hair which framed them. (Fannie Hurst, Star-Dust)

Springing up through that polychromatic flood myriads of pedicles - slender and straight as spears, or soaring in spirals, or curving with undulations gracile as the white serpents of Tanit in ancient Carthaginian groves - and all surmounted by a fantasy of spore cases in shapes of minaret and turret, domes and spires and cones, caps of Phrygia and bishops’ mitres, shapes grotesque and unnameable—shapes delicate and lovely! (A Merritt, The Moon Pool)

Origin:
'slender, thin,' 1620s, from Latin gracilis 'slender, thin, fine; plain, simple, meager' (source of French grêle), of unknown origin. Not etymologically connected to grace but often regarded as if it is. Perhaps a dissimilation of a word related to Latin cracens 'slender;' if so, perhaps cognate with Sanskrit krsah 'thin, weak,' Avestan keresa- 'lean, meager,' Lithuanian karšti 'to be very old, to age.' (Online Etymology Dictionary)