Definition of "brittle"

brittle

/ˈbɹɪtl̩/

adjective
comparative brittler or more brittle, superlative brittlest or most brittle
1. Inflexible; liable to break, snap, or shatter easily under stress, pressure, or impact.
  Quotations
  '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.
  1951, Geoffrey Chaucer, translated by Nevill Coghill, The Canterbury Tales: Translated into Modern English (Penguin Classics), Penguin Books, published 1977, page 329
2. Not physically tough or tenacious; apt to break or crumble when bending.
3. (archaeology) Said of rocks and minerals with a conchoidal fracture; capable of being knapped or flaked.
4. Emotionally fragile, easily offended.
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) Diabetes that is characterized by dramatic swings in blood sugar level.
noun
usually uncountable, plural brittles
1. A confection of caramelized sugar and nuts.
2. (by extension) Anything resembling this confection, such as flapjack, a cereal bar, etc.
verb
third-person singular simple present brittles, present participle brittling, simple past and past participle brittled
1. (intransitive) To become brittle.
  Quotations
  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.
  1999, J. Siekmann, Maria T. Pazienza, J. G. Carbonell, Information Extraction: Towards Scalable, Adaptable Systems, page 24
  Her heart fluttered, then stilled when May snapped the image away and her voice brittled.
  2020, Alys Murray, The Magnolia Sisters

Definition of "brittle"

brittle

adjective

Quotations

noun

verb

Quotations