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BRICK
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Rectangular block of clay baked by the sun or in a kiln; used as a building or paving material
Classified under:
Nouns denoting man-made objects
Hypernyms ("brick" is a kind of...):
ceramic (an artifact made of hard brittle material produced from nonmetallic minerals by firing at high temperatures)
building material (material used for constructing buildings)
Meronyms (substance of "brick"):
clay (a very fine-grained soil that is plastic when moist but hard when fired)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "brick"):
adobe; adobe brick (sun-dried brick; used in hot dry climates)
clinker; clinker brick (a hard brick used as a paving stone)
firebrick (brick made of fire clay; used for lining e.g. furnaces and chimneys)
cope; coping; header (brick that is laid sideways at the top of a wall)
mud brick (a brick made from baked mud)
Sense 2
Meaning:
A good fellow; helpful and trustworthy
Classified under:
Hypernyms ("brick" is a kind of...):
good person (a person who is good to other people)
II. (verb)
Sense 1
Present simple (first person singular and plural, second person singular and plural, third person plural) of the verb brick
Context examples:
The house was built in Elizabeth's time, and is a large, regular, brick building; heavy, but respectable looking, and has many good rooms.
(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)
This place, Deep Dene House, is a big modern villa of staring brick, standing back in its own grounds, with a laurel-clumped lawn in front of it.
(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
"Your box arrived all right. It's in your room. But it's a hell of a thing to call a trunk. An' what's in it? Gold bricks?"
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
One smallest new fact obtained in the laboratory, one brick built into the temple of science, far outweighs any second-hand exposition which passes an idle hour, but can leave no useful result behind it.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
At half-past twelve we found ourselves upon the steps of Mrs. Warren’s house—a high, thin, yellow-brick edifice in Great Orme Street, a narrow thoroughfare at the northeast side of the British Museum.
(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Coal tar pitch is mainly used as a binder for aluminum smelting electrodes, but is also used in coating surfaces, in roofing materials, to impregnate and strengthen refractory brick and is used to produce pitch coke.
(Coal Tar Pitch, NCI Thesaurus)
For their study, the Sri Lankan research team built a set of identical walls from materials commonly used to build homes in the tropics, including brick, cement blocks, mud bricks and Cabook – bricks made from laterite soil.
(Smoother walls healthier for lungs, SciDev.Net)
Across his thighs was a wooden board, and scattered over it all manner of slips of wood and knobs of brick and stone, each laid separate from the other, as a huckster places his wares.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Four men trapped under as much as 10 feet of bricks, mud and other debris have been rescued in Nepal thanks to a new search-and-rescue technology developed in partnership by the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
(DHS and NASA Technology Helps Save Four in Nepal Earthquake Disaster, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)
Toward evening they came to a great forest, where the trees grew so big and close together that their branches met over the road of yellow brick.
(The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum)
