broken reed
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.01 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Something or someone very fragile or unreliable.
Example Sentences
- "Lo, thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed, on Egypt; whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it: so is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all that trust in him."
- "Many of the big estates survived. Nor was the peasantry a broken reed in terms of demand for manufactured products."
- "A law on privacy would be cumbersome and hard to police, but as the Press Complaints Commission is a broken reed in this matter, each scandal makes it harder to stave off calls for legislation."