faculty: [14] If one has a faculty for doing something, one finds it ‘easy’ to do. The word comes, via Old French faculte, from Latin facultās. This was a parallel form to facilitās (source of English facility [15]). Both were derived from Latin facilis ‘easy’ (whence English facile [15]), an adjective formed from the verb facere ‘do’. Since facilitās more closely resembled facilis, it retained its connotations of ‘easiness’, whereas by the classical period facultās had more or less lost them, coming to mean ‘capability, power’. => facile, facility