Verb

(en verb)

* 1895 , H. G. Wells, The Time Machine Chapter XI

*:I don't know if you have ever thought what a rare thing in the absence of man and in a temperate climate, flames must be. The sun's heat is rarely strong enough to burn even when focussed by dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with the heat of its fermentation, but this again rarely results in flames. Now, in this decadent age the art of fire-making had been altogether forgotten on the earth. The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.

(obsolete) To smother; to suffocate; to choke.

(Holinshed)

(Palsgrave)

Verb

(bristl)

To rise or stand erect, like bristles.

* Sir Walter Scott

His hair did bristle upon his head.

To appear as if covered with bristles; to have standing, thick and erect, like bristles.

* Thackeray

the hill of La Haye Sainte bristling with ten thousand bayonets

* Macaulay

ports bristling with thousands of masts

To be on one's guard or raise one's defenses; to react with fear, suspicion, or distance.

* Shakespeare

Now for the bare-picked bone of majesty / Doth dogged war bristle his angry crest.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-22, volume=407, issue=8841, page=70, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Engineers of a different kind , passage=Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers. Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets is only a small part of what leveraged buy-outs are about, they insist. Improving the workings of the businesses they take over is just as core to their calling, if not more so. Much of their pleading is public-relations bluster.}}

To fix a bristle to.

to bristle a thread