FACILITY
facility
(noun) a service that an organization or a piece of equipment offers you; “a cell phone with internet facility”
facility
(noun) something designed and created to serve a particular function and to afford a particular convenience or service; “catering facilities”; “toilet facilities”; “educational facilities”
facility, installation
(noun) a building or place that provides a particular service or is used for a particular industry; “the assembly plant is an enormous facility”
facility, readiness
(noun) a natural effortlessness; “they conversed with great facility”; “a happy readiness of conversation”--Jane Austen
adeptness, adroitness, deftness, facility, quickness
(noun) skillful performance or ability without difficulty; “his quick adeptness was a product of good design”; “he was famous for his facility as an archer”
Source: WordNet® 3.1
Etymology
Noun
facility (countable and uncountable, plural facilities)
The fact of being easy, or easily done; absence of difficulty, simplicity. [from 16th c.]
Dexterity of speech or action; skill, talent. [from 16th c.]
The physical means or contrivances to make something (especially a public service) possible; the required equipment, infrastructure, location etc. [from 19th c.]
An institution specially designed for a specific purpose, such as incarceration, military use, or scientific experimentation.
(North America, in the plural) A toilet. [from 20th c.]
(Scotland, legal) A condition of mental weakness less than idiocy, but enough to make a person easily persuaded to do something against their better interest.
(dated) Affability.
Source: Wiktionary
Fa*cil"i*ty, n.; pl. Facilities. Etym: [L. facilitas, fr. facilis
easy: cf. F. facilitFacile.]
1. The quality of being easily performed; freedom from difficulty;
ease; as, the facility of an operation.
The facility with which government has been overturned in France.
Burke
.
2. Ease in performance; readiness proceeding from skill or use;
dexterity; as, practice gives a wonderful facility in executing works
of art.
3. Easiness to be persuaded; readiness or compliance; -- usually in a
bad sense; pliancy.
It is a great error to take facility for good nature. L'Estrange.
4. Easiness of access; complaisance; affability.
Offers himself to the visits of a friend with facility. South.
5. That which promotes the ease of any action or course of conduct;
advantage; aid; assistance; -- usually in the plural; as, special
facilities for study.
Syn.
– Ease; expertness; readiness; dexterity; complaisance;
condescension; affability.
– Facility, Expertness, Readiness. These words have in common the
idea of performing any act with ease and promptitude. Facility
supposes a natural or acquired power of dispatching a task with
lightness and ease. Expertness is the kind of facility acquired by
long practice. Readiness marks the promptitude with which anything is
done. A merchant needs great facility in dispatching business; a
bunker, great expertness in casting accounts; both need great
readiness in passing from one employment to another. "The facility
which we get of doing things by a custom of doing, makes them often
pass in us without our notice." Locke. "The army was celebrated for
the expertness and valor of the soldiers." "A readiness obey the
known will of God is the surest means to enlighten the mind in
respect to duty."
Source: Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary 1913 Edition