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