bristle

1. 1.

   a stiff fiber (coarse hair or filament); natural or synthetic

   Broaderfiber

   Part ofbrush
2. 2.

   a stiff hair

   Broaderhair

Other forms of bristle

plural

bristles·

past tense

bristled·

present participle

bristling·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about bristle

What does bristle mean?

bristle means "be in a state of movement or action". That is the primary sense; the word has 6 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in bristle?

bristle has 2 syllables: bris-tle. The stress falls on "bris". In IPA it is /ˈbɹɪsəl/.

What is another word for bristle?

Close synonyms include abound, burst, uprise, stand up. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is bristle a common word?

bristle is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.