brindled

comparative more brindled · superlative most brindled

1. Of a brownish, tawny or gray colour, with streaks or spots; streaky, spotted.

   Some brindled curs hurried from beneath the houses to sniff at Flo […]

   1934, George Orwell, chapter 4, in Burmese Days

   3 more examples

   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.

   1725–1726, Homer, “Book 10”, in [William Broome, Elijah Fenton, Alexander Pope], transl., The Odyssey of Homer. […], London: […] Bernard Lintot, →OCLC

   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.

   1853, Melville, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!

   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.

   1904, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of Black Peter, Norton, published 2005, page 982

   Synonyms: brindlish

1. participlepastsimple past and past participle of brindle

   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, [...]

   1862, Thoreau, Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree