brittle.
Inflexible; liable to break, snap, or shatter easily under stress, pressure, or impact.
Meaning & usage
Inflexible; liable to break, snap, or shatter easily under stress, pressure, or impact.
Cast iron is much more brittle than forged iron.
A diamond is hard but 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.
Tending to fracture in a conchoidal way; capable of being knapped or flaked.
Emotionally fragile, easily offended.
What a brittle person! A little misunderstanding and he's an emotional wreck.
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.
Characterized by dramatic swings in blood sugar level.
Where this word comes from
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.
A confection of caramelized sugar and nuts.
As a child, my favorite candy was peanut brittle.
Anything resembling this confection, such as flapjack, a cereal bar, etc.
Where this word comes from
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.
To become brittle.
To gut.
Where this word comes from
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.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.