Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • etc. See brier, briery, etc.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Same as brier.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Any thorny plant, now especially a wild rose.
  • noun The white heath, Erica arborea.
  • noun A pipe made from the root of this plant.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun Eurasian rose with prickly stems and fragrant leaves and bright pink flowers followed by scarlet hips
  • noun a pipe made from the root (briarroot) of the tree heath
  • noun evergreen treelike Mediterranean shrub having fragrant white flowers in large terminal panicles and hard woody roots used to make tobacco pipes
  • noun a very prickly woody vine of the eastern United States growing in tangled masses having tough round stems with shiny leathery leaves and small greenish flowers followed by clusters of inedible shiny black berries

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English brær.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French bruyère, assimilated with Etymology 1, above.

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Examples

Comments

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  • "The next morning my ears, neck, shoulders and back looked as if I'd spent the night wrestling with thirty-three kittens in a briar patch crisscrossed with barbed wire during a hailstorm."

    - 'The Dice Man', Luke Rhinehart.

    February 4, 2008