Adjective

(en adjective)

Made up of sections having different, often bright, colours.

* {{quote-book, title=, year=1883, author=Omar Khayyám, trans. Edward Henry Whinfield, other=, section=No. 78, page=54, passage=

O foolish one! this molded earth is naught; / This particolored vault of heaven is naught; / Our sojourn in this seat of life and death / Is but one breath, and what is that but naught? }}

Adjective

(en adjective)

of a brownish, tawny or gray colour, with streaks or spots; streaky, spotted

* 1725 , Pope, Odyssey (translation),

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.

* 1853 , Melville,

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.

* 1862 , Thoreau,

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, [...]

* 1904 , Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’ (Norton 2005, p.982)

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.