# brittle
## English
### Etymology

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.

### Pronunciation

* IPA: /ˈbɹɪtl̩/
* Audio (US):(file)
* Rhymes: -ɪtəl

### Adjective

brittle (comparative brittler or more brittle, superlative brittlest or most brittle)
* 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.
* 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.
* (archaeology) Said of rocks and minerals with a conchoidal fracture; capable of being knapped or flaked.
* Emotionally fragile, easily offended.
    What a brittle personality! A little misunderstanding and he's an emotional wreck.
* (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.
* (informal, proscribed) Diabetes that is characterized by dramatic swings in blood sugar level.

#### Derived terms

* brittility
* brittle bone disease
* brittlebush
* brittle cinder
* brittle fracture
* brittlegill
* brittle hair syndrome
* brittlely
* brittleness
* brittle star
* brittlestem
* brittly
* embrittle
* nonbrittle
* quasibrittle
* unbrittle

#### Translations
### Noun

brittle (usually uncountable, plural brittles)
* A confection of caramelized sugar and nuts.
    As a child, my favorite candy was peanut brittle.
* (by extension) Anything resembling this confection, such as flapjack, a cereal bar, etc.

#### Synonyms

* brickle

#### Derived terms

* peanut brittle

#### Translations
### Verb

brittle (third-person singular simple present brittles, present participle brittling, simple past and past participle brittled)
* (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.
* (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”[.]

### See also

* break, breakable
* short (adjective)

### References

* ↑ Diabetes Mellitus (DM), Merck manual
* “brittle”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

### Anagrams

* blitter, triblet