Brittleness
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The state of being brittle (in various senses). uncountable, usually
"[David] Riesman did his best, in prefaces to two subsequent editions of the book (at great length in 1961, and, with some brittleness about having to do it once more, in 1969), to correct this reading—to insist that he never meant to suggest that Americans now were any more conformist than they ever had been, or that there's even such a thing as social structure without conformist consensus."
- 2 firm but easily broken wordnet
Example
More examples"[David] Riesman did his best, in prefaces to two subsequent editions of the book (at great length in 1961, and, with some brittleness about having to do it once more, in 1969), to correct this reading—to insist that he never meant to suggest that Americans now were any more conformist than they ever had been, or that there's even such a thing as social structure without conformist consensus."
Etymology
From brittle + -ness.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.