Definition of "brindled"

The palace in a woody vale they found,High raised of stone; a shaded space around;Where mountain wolves and brindled lions roam,(By magic tamed,) familiar to the dome.

1725–1726, Homer, “Book 10”, in [William Broome, Elijah Fenton, and Alexander Pope], transl., The Odyssey of Homer. […], London: […] Bernard Lintot

All round me were tokens of a divided empire. The old grass and the new grass were striving together. In the low wet swales the verdure peeped out in vivid green ; beyond, on the mountains, lay light patches of snow, strangely relieved against their russet sides; all the humped hills looked like brindled kine in the shivers.

1853, Melville, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!

And there, in the middle of it was the man himself—his face twisted like a lost soul in torment, and his great brindled beard stuck upwards in his agony.

1904, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of Black Peter, Norton, published 2005, page 982

Some brindled curs hurried from beneath the houses to sniff at Flo […]

1934, George Orwell, chapter 4, in Burmese Days‎

Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair [...] - some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like meridional lines, on a straw-colored ground, [...]

1862, Thoreau, Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree