Facility, n.; pl. Facilities.
Etymology: [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.
2 more senses
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."
Shades of meaning
Fernald has no entry of its own for facility; he lists it under ease.
Where he writes about it:
Ease may be either of condition or of action; facility is always of action; readiness is of action or of expected action. — from ease
Facility is always active; readiness may be active or passive; the speaker has facility of expression, readiness of wit; any appliance is in readiness for use. — from ease
Ease of action may imply merely the possession of ample power; facility always implies practise and skill; any one can press down the keys of a typewriter with ease; only the skilled operator works the machine with facility. — from ease