crozzle

English

Noun

crozzle (countable and uncountable, plural crozzles)

1. A brick deformed by excessive heating during its manufacture.
   • 1914, Alfred Broadhead Searle, Cement, Concrete and Bricks, page 377:

     Crozzles, burrs and clinkers are bricks which have partly lost their shape through overheating.

   • 1938, William Barr McKay, McKay's Building Construction:

     Excessive heating in the kiln may produce misshapen bricks known as crozzles.

   • 2011, Haimei Zhang, Building Materials in Civil Engineering, page 172:

     When a brick is roasted, the duration of heating should be proper and even to avoid place brick or crozzle.

2. Hardened slag from a cementation furnace.
   • 1991, Joan Day, The Industrial revolution in metals, page 272:

     The furnace was again entered, and the crust to the chests broken down; it had partially vitrified and had absorbed iron oxide and was removed in black, craggy pieces, often referred to as 'crozzle' - still sometimes to be found as a capping to walls in the vicinity of the old furnaces.

   • 2012, Margaret Drabble, The Peppered Moth:

     With or without her knowledge, with or without her consent, with or without her effort, she would sail onwards, away from Breaseborough, away from the smoke and the grime and the slag and the crozzle, away from stifling Dora, away from the hot fevered hours of study, away from the condescension of Gertrude Wadsworth and the rationed contempt of Miss Strachey, away from that snub about Mary Anning and the fossil bones.

   • 2016, Ian D. Rotherham, Secret Sheffield:

     The topping of stone walls all around the Sheffield area, which looks like large, crude, black lumps of Aero chocolate, is in fact furnace slag mostly from cementation furnaces. It has its own dialect name – crozzle.

3. A form of non-carbonaceous shale found between coal deposits.
   • 1998, J. G. Rees, Geology of the country around Stoke-on-Trent, page 17:

     Between the ammonoid bands are three horizons of highly sheared mudstone resembling the 'crozzle' beds described by Cope (1946) at a similar stratigraphical level west of Buxton, and known also in Lancashire.

See also

• hussle

Verb

crozzle (third-person singular simple present crozzles, present participle crozzling, simple past and past participle crozzled)

1. To shrink or shrivel from exposure to heat.
   • 1865, “The Terrible Mistake”, in Dollar Monthly Magazine, page 333:

     Gaston de Mowbray ground his hair in powder, and tore his teeth out in handfuls; his breath gushed forth with that icy coldness as to crozzle up the table before which he sat into a cinder; he paces the room to such an extent, that the past hung in penny cakes all over the apartment.

   • 1911, Lucius Trant O'Shea, Elementary Chemistry for Coal-mining Students:

     When undiluted all these oils burn badly causing the wick to char, or, as it is technically described, to "crozzle," which renders constant attention necessary if a good dlight is to be maintained.

   • 1929, Fred Clements, Blast Furnace Practice, volume 1, page 384:

     The high temperature tends to cause the material to crozzle, which makes it difficult to work in a kiln.