I encountered a new word.

Anyone else ever heard of it? Or is it just advertising blather?

I've seen it as a nonsense word, or as meaning tattered.

I've seen it used to describe the frying of bacon, and one of the dictionary.com's definitions is: "To fry (something) until crisp and curled: frizzled the bacon."

M-W Online gives three definitions for frizzle:

1. v., 1573. Frizz, curl. "Probably akin to Old Frisian frIsle curl".

2. n., 1613. A crisp curl.

3. v., 1839.

Transitive senses:
1. To fry until crisp and curled (fry + sizzle)
2. Burn or scorch.

Intransitive sense: to cook with a sizzling noise.

The OED Online gives similar definitions, plus an additional definition: n., 1629. "Frizzle, in flint and steel guns the piece of iron acted on by the flint to produce the explosion" (an 1892 quote).

Frizzle, in the sense of "curl", refers mostly to hair, though it can refer to things such as leaves or grass.

Frizzle can also be used metphorically, as in this 1874 quote from the OED: "He heard the molten lead bubbling and frizzling in our clerk's throat."

Frazzle (M-W, around 1825) means 1) to fray, unravel or tatter, or 2) to upset.

Tinman

Frizzle is quite common over here and would usually be used to describe something that had been cooked - usually fried - until it was very crispy, to the point of being burnt. Thus frizzled bacon would be very crisp and curled.

There is another meaning which suddenly started to be used a few years ago when we had a spell of slightly milder weather very quicky after a period of very heavy frost. The mild weather was accompanied by very light rain (drizzle) which froze as it landed. The resulting road surface was at one and the same time very slippery (even more slippery than sheet ice) and completely normal to look at. After one partcularly chaotic rush hour when most of the road around London were blocked with vehicles strewn broadside across the road, the newspapers christened the phenomenon "frizzle" meaning frozen drizzle.

Some people objected to the term claiming it implied something very much warmer than that which we were experiencing!

Richard English

So they would have preferred frozzle? There is an archaic term here for that phenomenon, "silver thaw." Since all the Californians moved here, the term isn't heard much any more. What IS heard is SLAM! CRUNCH!!! BAM! as they drive their Silly Useless Vehicles into one another.