a. [a. OF. frangible, as if ad. L. *frangibil-is, f. frangĕre to break.] Capable of being broken, breakable.
c. 1440. Songs & Carols (Percy Soc.), 65.
| An adamant stone it is not frangebyll | |
| With no thyng but with mylke of a gett. |
c. 1485. Digby Myst. (1882), III. 320. The frangabyll tyn, to Iubyter, yf ȝe can dyscus.
1598. Barret, Theor. Warres, V. ii. 128–9. What qualities the mount or hill is, whereupon it is seated, either if of hard stone, or of soft, frangible, and easie.
1647. Jer. Taylor, The Liberty of Prophesying, vi. 121. The Councell is blasphemous in saying that Christs glorified body is passible and frangible by naturall manducation.
1659. D. Pell, Impr. Sea, 383. Your ships … are but made up of … frangible materials.
1796. Kirwan, Elem. Min. (ed. 2), I. 223. Hardness from 7 to 9, difficultly frangible.
1865. Mrs. Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, in Cornh. Mag., XII. Sept., 259. Whenever the cook had made a mistake about the dinner, or the housemaid broken any little frangible article.
1883. C. F. Holder, Living Lamps, in Harper’s Mag., LXVI. Jan., 192/2. In most insects examined, the least frangible rays predominate.
b. as sb. in pl. Things breakable. nonce-use.
1824. Mirror, III. 19/2. Would you take up the poker, and, transforming it in your ‘mind’s eye’ into a truncheon, strut around your room, like the ghost in Hamlet, to the manifest terror of all frangibles in your reach?
Hence Frangibleness.
1676. H. More, Remarks, 100. The lightness and frangibleness of Glass are farther Indications of its porosity.
