Word of the Day: Fraught

fraught

fraught / frôt

 

adjective     

1. filled (with); accompanied

I was always fraught with guilt, and it’s such a waste of an emotion.

Kyra Sedgwick, 1965 –

 

2. uneasy; causing anxiety, tension or distress

I’m attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Ben Marcus, 1967 –

 

3. (archaic) loaded; carrying a heavy load

I reason’d with a Frenchman yesterday,

Who told me, in the narrow seas that part

The French and English, there miscarried

A vessel of our country richly fraught.

From “The Merchant of Venice” by William Shakespeare, 1564 – 1616

 

noun

1. (primarily Scottish, archaic) cargo, freight

Not quitting thy supreme command,

Thou held’st the rudder with a steady hand,

Till safely on the shore the bark did land;

The bark that all our blessings brought,

Charg’d with thyself and James, a doubly royal fraught.

From “Threnodia Augustalis: A Funeral-pindarique Poem Sacred to the Happy Memory of King Charles II” by John Dryden, 1631 – 1700