Crossword clues for brittle
brittle
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Brittle \Brit"tle\, a. [OE. britel, brutel, AS. bryttian to dispense, fr. bre['o]tan to break; akin to Icel. brytja, Sw. bryta, Dan. bryde. Cf. Brickle.] Easily broken; apt to break; fragile; not tough or tenacious.
Farewell, thou pretty, brittle piece
Of fine-cut crystal.
--Cotton.
Brittle silver ore, the mineral stephanite.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
late 14c., britel, perhaps from an unrecorded Old English adjective *brytel, related to brytan "to crush, pound, to break to pieces," from Proto-Germanic stem *brutila- "brittle," from *breutan "to break up" (cognates: Old Norse brjota "to break," Old High German brodi "fragile"), from PIE *bhreu- "to cut, break up" (see bruise (v.)). With -le, suffix forming adjectives with meaning "liable to."
Wiktionary
a. 1 inflexible, liable to break or snap easily under stress or pressure. 2 Not physically tough or tenacious; apt to break or crumble when bending. 3 (context archaeology English) Said of rocks and minerals with a conchoidal fracture; capable of being knapped or flaked. 4 Emotionally fragile, easily offended. 5 (context informal proscribed English), Merck manual diabetes that is characterized by dramatic swings in blood sugar level. n. 1 (context uncountable English) A confection of caramelized sugar and nuts. 2 (context uncountable English) Anything resembling this confection, such as flapjack, a cereal bar, etc.
WordNet
adj. having little elasticity; hence easily cracked or fractured or snapped; "brittle bones"; "glass is brittle"; "`brickle' and `brickly' are dialectal" [syn: brickle, brickly]
lacking warmth and generosity of spirit; "a brittle and calculating woman"
(of metal or glass) not annealed and consequently easily cracked or fractured [syn: unannealed]
Wikipedia
Brittleness is the liability of a material to fracture when subjected to stress.
Brittle may also refer to:
- Brittle (food), confections made of caramel and nuts
- Brittle (software), a computer error
Brittle is a type of confection consisting of flat broken pieces of hard sugar candy embedded with nuts such as pecans, almonds, or peanuts. It has many variations around the world, such as pasteli in Greece, croquant in France, gozinaki in Georgia, chikki in India and kotkoti in Bangladesh. In parts of the Middle East, brittle is made with pistachios, while many Asian countries use sesame seeds and peanuts. Peanut brittle is the most popular brittle recipe in the US. The term brittle first appears in print in 1892, though the candy itself has been around for much longer.
Traditionally, a mixture of sugar and water is heated to the hard crack stage corresponding to a temperature of approximately , although some recipes also call for ingredients such as corn syrup and salt in the first step. Nuts are mixed with the caramelized sugar. At this point spices, leavening agents, and often peanut butter or butter are added. The hot candy is poured out onto a flat surface for cooling, traditionally a granite or marble slab. The hot candy may be troweled to uniform thickness. When the brittle cools, it is broken into pieces.
Usage examples of "brittle".
In extreme cold, she had heard, engine steel turned brittle and could snap like balsa wood.
While I am skinning and brittling this fine doe for our meal, you go and thresh the bushes and grasses roundabout for every kind of seed you can collect.
I do not call it a village or even an encampment, because it was only a wide glade in the forest, scattered with cooking-fire rings of blackened stones carelessly tossed together, and with sleeping furs spread over pallets stuffed with fir sprigs, and with various cookery implements and skins stretched on drying hoops and bits of harness, and with saying knives and brittling knives, and with the gnawed bones and other remains of past meals.
Ojo Caliente was constantly being reshaped and rebuilt, in places spongy, in other places cracked and hard and brittle, the stuff of geyserite: a hydrous form of silica, a variety of opal deposited in gray and white concretelike masses, porous, filamentous, and scaly.
They were brittle with age, but white, picked clean by melk I guessed.
Made brittle by constant immersion in lethal ozone baths and high-altitude acid sleets, its fuselage and wings were riddled with pinholes from micrometeorite hits and passage through volcanic dust clouds.
In the beginning, Missus Anna stopped by the first Sunday of every month with a pail of milk and a treat, like a jar of sweet-tasting marmalade or a delicious candy she called peanut brittle.
But he grabbed the spider and squeezed, feeling the soft, brittle body turn to mushy pulp between his fingers.
It was a tactic Eurocops often employed against Yanks, that overdone, unfamiliar politesse, but she had faced it before, rather enjoyed the brittle game of it.
He heard the horse-hoofs by the myriads crushing down easily, deeply, into the loam, the prolonged clinking of tracechains, the working of the smooth brown flanks in the harness, the clatter of wooden hames, the champing of bits, the click of iron shoes against pebbles, the brittle stubble of the surface ground crackling and snapping as the furrows turned, the sonorous, steady breaths wrenched from the deep, labouring chests, strap-bound, shining with sweat, and all along the line the voices of the men talking to the horses.
Shards of brittle bone protruded from both thighs and both knees, where Lara Raith had exercised her marksmanship.
Midnight drifted through the perpetual twilight of Merod Schene DownTown, tall, brittle as leaf gold beaten translucent.
Bands and Stripes -- Dirty Borders -- Defective Selvedges -- Holes and Buttons -- Rubbed Places -- Creases -- Spots -- Loose and Bad Colours -- Badly Dyed Selvedges -- Hard Goods -- Brittle Goods -- Uneven Goods -- Removal of Bands, Stripes, Creases and Spots.
There was a sherd of moon partway up the eastern sky, and the stars all stood in their expected places and looked chill and brittle.
The corpses had been shrunk by the fierce heat into black, brittle manikins that smelt disturbingly of roasted pork.