A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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brindle
A coat pattern of irregular dark streaks laid over a lighter ground — tiger-striping, but soft-edged and vertical and rarely symmetrical. It occurs in cattle, dogs, horses, guinea pigs, and, in a different mechanism, in some wild cats. The streaks follow the same lines on the body that other mammalian coat patterns do, so a brindle animal and a tabby cat are marked along the same underlying map.
Etymology
An alteration of the older English brinded, which comes through Middle English brended from a Germanic root meaning burnt — the same family as brand, which was a piece of burning wood before it was a mark on cattle or a name on a product. A brindled animal was one that looked scorched, streaked as if by fire. The -le ending arrived by ordinary drift, the way tremble and crumple collected theirs.