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Brittle; inflexible; not ductile. [Obs.] Gold will be sometimes so eager, as artists call it, that it will as little endure the hammer as glass itself. Locke.

de. -- Ear finger, the little finger. -- Ear of Dionysius, a kind of ear trumpet with a flexible tube; -- named from the Sicilian tyrant, who constructed a device to overhear the prisoners in his dungeons. -- Ear sand (Anat.), otoliths. See Otolith. -- Ear snail (Zoöl.), any snail of the genus Auricula and allied g…

of sensibility, of voluntary motion, and largely of mental power. The body is erect and inflexible; the pulsation and breathing are not affected. Mayne.

Flexible wood worked into the top of hedge stakes, to bind them together. [Obs.] Tusser.

A mineral resin, of a blackish brown color, occurring in soft, flexible masses; -- called also mineral caoutchouc, and elastic bitumen.

A defense for the shoulder, composed of flexible overlapping plates of metal, used in the 15th century; -- the origin of the modern epaulette. Fairholt.

Easily persuaded to good or bad; yielding; ductile to a fault; pliant; flexible. Since Adam, and his facile consort Eve, Lost Paradise, deceived by me. Milton. This is treating Burns like a child, a person of so facile a disposition as not to be trusted without a keeper on the king's highway. Prof. Wilson.…

To hang loose without stiffness; to bend down, as flexible bodies; to be loose, yielding, limp. As loose it [the sail] flagged around the mast. T. Moore.

Shaped like a whiplash; long, slender, round, flexible, and (comming) tapering.

A young, flexible shoot of a plant; esp., the long trailing branch of a vine, or a slender branch in certain mosses.

Weak; flexible; limber. "Flaggy wings." Spenser.

The state or quality of being flexible; flexibleness; pliancy; pliability; as, the flexibility of strips of hemlock, hickory, whalebone or metal, or of rays of light. Sir I. Newton. All the flexibility of a veteran courtier. Macaulay.

Flexible; pliant; pliable; easily bent; plastic; tractable. Wordsworth.

A doubling,esp. of any flexible substance; a part laid over on another part; a plait; a plication. Mummies . . . shrouded in a number of folds of linen. Bacon. Folds are most common in the rocks of mountainous regions. J. D. Dana.

To encircle or bind with any flexible band.

an sea fan (Gorgonia flabellum), sea plume (G. setosa), and other allied species having a flexible, horny axis.

One who, or that which, grooms horses; especially, a brush rotated by a flexible or jointed revolving shaft, for cleaning horses.

filaments, consisting, in invertebrate animals, of a long, tubular part which is free and flexible, and a bulbous root imbedded in the skin. Then read he me how Sampson lost his hairs. Chaucer. And draweth new delights with hoary hairs. Spenser.

The hook with its eye, or the joint, on which a door, gate, lid, etc., turns or swings; a flexible piece, as a strip of leather, which serves as a joint to turn on. The gate self-opened wide, On golden hinges turning. Milton.

A pipe with a long, flexible stem, so arranged that the smoke is cooled by being made to pass through water.