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Friable   Listen
adjective
Friable  adj.  Easily crumbled, pulverized, or reduced to powder. "Friable ground." "Soft and friable texture."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Friable" Quotes from Famous Books



... more volatile constituents of the tar to be expelled, whereby small flames appeared upon the surface within the limits of the fire; the roofing paper was not completely destroyed. There always remained a cohesive substance, although it was charred and friable, which by reason of its bad conductivity of heat protected the roof boarding to such an extent that it was "browned" only by the developed tar vapors. A fire was next started within a building covered ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various

... of a hussar, and who turned round at every discharge of canister and tried to hide behind Napoleon: "Fool, it is shameful! You'll get yourself killed with a ball in the back." He who writes these lines has himself found, in the friable soil of this knoll, on turning over the sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb, disintegrated, by the oxidization of six and forty years, and old fragments of iron which parted like ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... the angle of repose; it gives way in masses like a brick wall. It is architectural soil, it seeks approximately the right angle—the level plain or the vertical wall. It erodes easily under running water, but it does not slide; sand and clay are in such proportions as to make a brittle but not a friable soil. ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... so friable and poor that the Greek burglar was known as a "Wall-digger." It did not pay him to pick a lock; it was simpler for him to quarry his way through the ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... salmon color produced by burning, but usually well polished. As additional distinguishing features of this group we notice that the shape is more generally globular, the workmanship rather superior, and the pottery somewhat harder and less friable than that of the other group; the angular and geometrical figures formed by straight lines are more common in this group; here we also find the meander or Greek fret correctly drawn, the vine, and several other designs rarely or never found in the other group. The ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson

... lemon yellow with tellurium. As in case of arsenic and antimony, the hydrogen evolved at the negative pole combines with the reduced substances, forming hydrogen, selenide, or telluride, which remain in part in solution in the liquid. The reduced metal separates out at the anode in a friable condition.—Zeitschrift fur Analytische Chemie, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various

... smaller ones, become enlarged, varicose; and an aggregation of varicosed vessels forms a tumor called a pile or hemorrhoid. Inflammation interferes with nutrition of the anal and rectal tissues, rendering them friable or weak and easily broken; whence the bleeding and painful fissure or the anal ulcer, which so often are the outcome of proctitis and an accompaniment ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison

... except where bitten into by the sea, but elsewhere it is riven, and presents cliffs, and these cliffs are not at all like that of Shakespeare at Dover, but overhang, where hard beds alternate with others that are friable. These latter are corroded by the weather, and leave the more compact projecting like the roofs of penthouses. They are furrowed horizontally, licked smooth by the wind and rain. Not only so, but the chalk cliffs are riddled with caves, that are ancient water-courses. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... trees. Valleys and plains, even in some places the slopes of the hills, are sparsely covered with those delicate aromatic herbs which affect a stony soil. Their life is a perpetual struggle against the sun: scorched, dried up, to all appearance dead, and so friable that they crumble to pieces in the fingers when one attempts to gather them, the spring rains annually infuse into them new life, and bestow upon them, almost before one's eyes, a green and perfumed youth of some days' duration. The summits of the hills remain always ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... wonderful stretches of waving green where the buffalo once grew fat. Moreover the fine glacial soil of the prairies is so clayey and compact that the roots of trees cannot easily penetrate it. Since grasses send their roots only into the more friable upper layers of soil, they possess another ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... Monasteries and 50,000 souls:" till on Christmas midnight A.D. 1277, the winds and the storm-rains having got to their height, Ocean and Ems did, "about midnight," undermine the place, folded it over like a friable bedquilt or monstrous doomed griddle-cake, and swallowed it all away. Most of it, they say, that night, the whole of it within ten years coming; [Busching,—Erdbeschreibung,—v. 845, 846; Preuss, i. 308, 309.]—and there it has hung, like an ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... see that all the rock there is coral, none of which is in position. The surface, the caves, the chinks, and the numerous pot-holes are compact limestone, often quite crystalline, while beneath it is oolitic, either friable or hard enough to be used for buildings. The hills are sand-blown, not upheaved. On a majority of the maps of the sixteenth century there were islands on Mouchoir, and on Silver Banks, where now are rocks ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale

... well even when four years old. Owing to its small size, the seed should be planted in a seedpan or flat in a greenhouse or hotbed, where all conditions can be controlled. The soil should be made very fine and friable, the thinly scattered seeds merely pressed upon the surface with a block or a brick, and water applied preferably through the bottom of the seedpan, which may be set in a shallow dish of water until the surface of the soil begins ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains

... interpose to waken spleen In him whose vision grasped the unseen, Whose counsellor was the ready blade, Whose argument the cannonade. He loathed his land's divergent parties, loth To grant them speech, they were such idle troops; The friable and the grumous, dizzards both. Men were good sticks his mastery wrought from hoops; Some serviceable, none credible on oath. The silly preference they nursed to die In beds he scorned, and led where they should lie. If magic made them pliable for his use, Magician he could be by planned surprise. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Spey. This state of things would continue as long as a sufficiently high barrier remained at the mouth of Glen Roy. The lake thus dammed in, with its surface at the level of the highest parallel road, would act, as in Glen Gluoy, upon the friable drift overspreading the mountains, and would form the highest road or ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... white woollen tunics and robes into which are woven bands of brilliant colour, abound. Often these ape the cut and purple edge that distinguishes the samurai. In Utopian London the air is as clear and less dusty than it is among high mountains; the roads are made of unbroken surfaces, and not of friable earth; all heating is done by electricity, and no coal ever enters the town; there are no horses or dogs, and so there is not a suspicion of smoke and scarcely a particle of any sort of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... not only, year by year, altering the conformation of all sand and clay bluff's on the Plains, but is tearing down, rebuilding, and fashioning on its facile lathe many rock-strata of the solidity of the more friable grits, wherever exposed to its action. Water at the East does hardly more than wind at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... the tissues and muscles, and is the chief ingredient of the nerves, glands, and even the brain itself. And in all these developmental stages, its tendency is to coagulate rather than precipitate. In its coagulated condition, it dries to a hard, partially translucent and friable state, and is more or less insoluble in water, and entirely so at a temperature from 140A deg. to 160A ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... Everywhere the streams were found cutting through rocks of slate. On the summits of many of the hills were found weathered masses of angular quartz rocks, showing that while the slate had yielded to the action of the elements, the harder and less friable rock had kept its place. The ridges which intervene between the St. Lawrence at the river Du Loup and Lake Temiscouata have the character, so well described by Elie de Beaumont, of mountains elevated by ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson



Words linked to "Friable" :   crumbly, friability, breakable



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