brittle

Meaning

1. Inflexible; liable to break, snap, or shatter easily under stress, pressure, or impact.
2. Not physically tough or tenacious; apt to break or crumble when bending.
3. Tending to fracture in a conchoidal way; capable of being knapped or flaked.
4. Emotionally fragile, easily offended.
5. 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. Characterized by dramatic swings in blood sugar level.
7. A confection of caramelized sugar and nuts.
8. Anything resembling this confection, such as flapjack, a cereal bar, etc.
9. To become brittle.
10. To gut.
11. A surname.

Etymology / origin

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.

Related words

Descendant words

• бръст(Bulgarian) (cog)
• *brudъ(Proto-Slavic) (cog)

Sources

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