Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Like tinder; very inflammable.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • What can be done now to stop what seems to be an almost tinder-like situation from exploding?

    CNN Transcript Jul 28, 2002 2002

  • If instead of tinder-like weeds, we have so much coffee that we will not bother to pick the coffee beans growing there.

    CASTRO DELIVERS SPEECH AT GUANE CEREMONY 1967

  • The tinder-like material, with which these first buildings were constructed, together with the open central fires, made them a prey to flames in January, 1608, which shortly were out of control.

    Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century Annie Lash Jester

  • They could not be removed, and a single spark from the frail and tinder-like materials might send the whole in an instant to the skies.

    Captain Canot or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver Theodore Canot

  • The flames were spreading in the dry, tinder-like grass, and for a moment Dave was worried.

    Cowboy Dave Frank V. Webster

  • Then, whether the building was older and more tinder-like than was supposed, or whether

    The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast Victor [pseud.] Appleton

  • Cotton-wood, rooted in naked sand beside a water-course, and shielded from prairie-fires by the high, precipitous bank; for, scanty as is the herbage of the desert, the fierce winds which sweep over it will yet, especially in late spring or early summer, drive a fire (which has obtained a start in some fairly grassed vale or nook) through its dead, tinder-like remains.

    The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 2, February, 1862 Devoted To Literature And National Policy Various

  • The dry tinder-like shingles, rotted by the autumn and winter rains and scorched by the searing spring and summer sun for two generations, blazed like coals in a forge.

    Tobacco Road Caldwell, Erskine, 1903- 1934

  • Torn by the wind, stems of flaming grass were showered on the house, some dying as they burned out, others leaving a glowing spark imbedded in the dry tinder-like shingles that had covered the house for fifty years or more.

    Tobacco Road Caldwell, Erskine, 1903- 1934

  • I am known to be a humorous patrician, and one that loves a cup of hot wine with not a drop of allaying Tiber in’t; said to be something imperfect in favouring the first complaint; hasty and tinder-like upon too trivial motion; one that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning.

    Act II. Scene I. Coriolanus 1914

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