brittle

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brittle

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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.

• IPA^(key): /ˈbɹɪtl̩/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪtəl

brittle (comparative brittler or more brittle, superlative brittlest or most brittle)

1. Inflexible; liable to break, snap, or shatter easily under stress, pressure, or impact; crackly.

   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.

2. 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.

3. (archaeology) Said of rocks and minerals with a conchoidal fracture; capable of being knapped or flaked.
4. Emotionally fragile, easily offended.

   What a brittle personality! A little misunderstanding and he's an emotional wreck.

5. (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.
6. (informal, proscribed)^[1] Diabetes that is characterized by dramatic swings in blood sugar level.

brittle (usually uncountable, plural brittles)

1. A confection of caramelized sugar and nuts.

   As a child, my favorite candy was peanut brittle.

2. (by extension) Anything resembling this confection, such as flapjack, a cereal bar, etc.

• brickle

• peanut brittle

brittle (third-person singular simple present brittles, present participle brittling, simple past and past participle brittled)

1. (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.

2. (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”[.]

• break, breakable
• short (adjective)

• “brittle”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

• blitter, triblet