0 to break, or cause something to break, into small pieces: --
1 a sweet dish made from fruit covered in a mixture of flour, butter, and sugar rubbed together into small pieces, baked, and eaten hot: --
apple crumble
The £1.3 billion to repair crumbling classrooms will do a lot to help teachers' morale.
Schools and clinics had crumbled, roads were impassable.
The movement of people, ideas, goods, the end of certain great totalitarian empires, the crumbling of walls and iron curtains represent real progress overall.
The outer surfaces of the columns have crumbled badly and are being repaired at a cost of £131.
In this paranoid world, in which women were often selected as scapegoats for the crumbling social order, such 'powerful' constructions could also serve to justify patriarchal backlash.
Since then the old social basis has largely crumbled away, and it has not always been possible to make up for the lost votes from other sources.
In this particular context, many scholars note that authoritarianism is probably bad for growth because it prevents the public from evicting corrupt politicians even when the national economy is crumbling.
However, when state capacity to suppress the potential for conflict crumbled, interethnic conflicts resurfaced at an unprecedented scale with devastating results, both in terms of human life and physical costs.
