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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
bristly
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A bitter wind whips across the seared fields and bristly pastures behind the produce stand.
▪ Cluster flies are bristly gray insects, about five times bigger than the ordinary housefly, Musca domestica.
▪ Like Taylor, Goodrich was a bristly sort.
▪ Old Thorvald was 87 and his jowled face was bristly with white whiskers.
▪ Only months before he had held me like this and pressed his bristly mouth against mine.
▪ The guy was all bristly and red and puffed up, in fatigue pants and a brown shirt.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Bristly

Bristly \Bris"tly\, a. Thick set with bristles, or with hairs resembling bristles; rough.

The leaves of the black mulberry are somewhat bristly.
--Bacon.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
bristly

1590s, from bristle (n.) + -y (2). Figurative sense is recorded from 1872. Related: Bristliness.

Wiktionary
bristly

a. 1 Covered with bristles. 2 Easily antagonized; irascible; prone to bristling. alt. 1 Covered with bristles. 2 Easily antagonized; irascible; prone to bristling.

WordNet
bristly
  1. adj. very irritable; "bristly exchanges between the White House and the press"; "he became prickly and spiteful"; "witty and waspish about his colleagues" [syn: prickly, splenetic, waspish]

  2. having or covered with protective barbs or quills or spines or thorns or setae etc.; "a horse with a short bristly mane"; "bristly shrubs"; "burred fruits"; "setaceous whiskers" [syn: barbed, barbellate, briary, briery, bristled, burred, burry, prickly, setose, setaceous, spiny, thorny]

Wikipedia

Usage examples of "bristly".

Ray looked also, noting the barest hint of scales--and black, bristly hairs.

He saw them standing over him in the dark as he slept, their bristly claws moving, their great beaks clacking, their huge gleaming eyes aglow with malevolence.

More unusual still, Hresh, who wore a helmet perhaps once every five years, had one on now: a small one, some cleverly interwoven strips of dark bristly fiber bound by a single golden band, but a helmet nevertheless.

She puts forth her hand, and a hard bristly claw takes it and holds it.

Zechtior Lukin studied them calmly, staring at their long shining bodies, their many-faceted eyes, their segmented orange breathing-tubes, their jutting beaks, their six slender bristly limbs.

One of the hjjks touched it lightly along its long jaw with a bristly forearm, and it turned at once and began to go forward.

Very likely only the hard bristly claws of hjjks had traveled this way before today.

Queen-attendants came up close against him, surrounding him on all sides, their hard shells and bristly limbs pressing tight.

But then in the swirling madness he caught sight of an angular yellow-and-black figure just in front of him, clutching a short sword in one bristly claw and a spear in another.

He held Randy in his arms, petting the bristly fur, and he remembered.

His belly felt full of acid, and it lurched quite involuntarily when Randy, responding to the signs that he was awake, leaped onto the mattress and presented her bristly back to be scratched.

He could catch his breath while he petted the bristly back of the spider who was leading them, he hoped, toward her mistress and his mate.

Only at the end did they find one against whose side huddled a bristly spider.

Her hand clutched at the familiar bristly shape cuddling itself against her.

The spider meeped softly at this mention of her name, and Muffy petted her bristly pelt.