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Webster 1913 Edition


Brindled

Brin′dled

,
Adj.
[A dim. form of
brinded
.]
Having dark streaks or spots on a gray or tawny ground; brinded.
“With a brindled lion played.”
Churchill.

Webster 1828 Edition


Brindled

BRIN'DLED

,
Adj.
spotted; variegated with spots of different colors.

Definition 2024


brindled

brindled

English

A brindled cow

Adjective

brindled (comparative more brindled, superlative most brindled)

  1. of a brownish, tawny or gray colour, with streaks or spots; streaky, spotted
    • 1725, Pope, Odyssey (translation), book 10
      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.
    • 1853, Melville, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!
      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.
    • 1862, Thoreau, Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree
      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, [...]
    • 1904, Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’ (Norton 2005, p.982)
      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.
    • 1934, George Orwell, Burmese Days, Chapter 4,
      Some brindled curs hurried from beneath the houses to sniff at Flo []

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