brittle
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See also: Brittle
English
Etymology
From Middle English britel, brutel, brotel (“brittle”), from Old English *brytel, *bryttol (“brittle, fragile”, literally “prone to or tending to break”); equivalent to brit + -le.
Pronunciation
Adjective
brittle (comparative brittler or more brittle, superlative brittlest or most brittle)
- Inflexible; liable to break, snap, or shatter easily under stress, pressure, or impact.
- Cast iron is much more brittle than forged iron.
- A diamond is hard but brittle.
- 1951, Geoffrey Chaucer, translated by Nevill Coghill, The Canterbury Tales: Translated into Modern English (Penguin Classics), Penguin Books, published 1977, page 329:
- 'Do you suppose our convent, and I too, / Are insufficient, then, to pray for you? / Thomas, that joke's not good. Your faith is brittle.
- Not physically tough or tenacious; apt to break or crumble when bending.
- Shortbread is my favorite cold pastry, yet being so brittle it crumbles easily, and a lot goes to waste.
- (archaeology) Said of rocks and minerals with a conchoidal fracture; capable of being knapped or flaked.
- Emotionally fragile, easily offended.
- What a brittle personality! A little misunderstanding and he's an emotional wreck.
- (engineering, computing, of a system) Poorly error- or fault-tolerant; having little in the way of redundancy or defense in depth; susceptible to catastrophic failure in the event of a relatively-minor malfunction or deviance.
- (informal, proscribed) Diabetes that is characterized by dramatic swings in blood sugar level.
Derived terms
Translations
able to break or snap easily under stress or pressure
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apt to break or crumble when bending
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emotionally fragile, easily offended
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Noun
brittle (usually uncountable, plural brittles)
- A confection of caramelized sugar and nuts.
- As a child, my favorite candy was peanut brittle.
- (by extension) Anything resembling this confection, such as flapjack, a cereal bar, etc.
Synonyms
Derived terms
Translations
confection of caramelized sugar and nuts
Verb
brittle (third-person singular simple present brittles, present participle brittling, simple past and past participle brittled)
- (intransitive) To become brittle.
- 1999, J. Siekmann, Maria T. Pazienza, J. G. Carbonell, Information Extraction: Towards Scalable, Adaptable Systems, page 24:
- The project is based on a similar project, the Class project, which was started by the University of Cornell several years ago under the leadership of Stuart Lynn to preserve brittling old books.
- 2020, Alys Murray, The Magnolia Sisters:
- Her heart fluttered, then stilled when May snapped the image away and her voice brittled.
- (transitive, obsolete) To gut.
- 1866, Charles Kingsley, chapter 38, in Hereward the Wake, London: Nelson:
- Not being versed in the terms of English venery, he asked Abbot Ulfketyl what brittling of a deer might mean; and being informed that it was that operation on the carcass of a stag which his countrymen called eventrer, and Highland gillies now “gralloching”[.]
See also
References
- ^ Diabetes Mellitus (DM), Merck manual
- “brittle”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.