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