Bit one's nails, perhaps

Usage examples of fretted.

Then Condy promptly got the hiccoughs from drinking his tea too fast, and fretted up and down the room like a chicken with the pip till Travis grew faint and weak with laughter.

In Shreveport, the headquarters of the Confederate Army of the West, Lieutenant General Kirby Smith, the third of that auspicious surname to be involved, worried and fretted, but could not release General Taylor and his thin Louisiana division to the attack until the scattered grayback Army of the West could be collected from its far-flung posts and concentrated against the advancing Union Army.

For still the garden stood in golden mist, Still, like a river of molten amethyst, The Seine slipt through its spans of fretted stone, And, near the grille that once fenced in a throne, The fountains still unbraided to the day The unsubstantial silver of their spray.

Why is it fretted with the ceaseless flow Of flood and ebb, with overgrowth and dearth, And vext with dreams, and clouded with strange woe?

Master Lokos had never fretted that craft masters of other trades laughed at him, he had treated his apprentices like his own sons and daughters, rather than doing for them only that which the law commanded.

I liked, while her father and mother only laughed, and the silly Harlequin fretted and fumed at not being able to take the same liberties with his Dulcinea.

Here may often be found the family of a petty tradesman, with its trumpery furniture, burrowing among the relics of antiquated finery in great rambling time-stained apartments with fretted ceilings, gilded cornices, and enormous marble fireplaces.

She fretted through the nights, and was never really at peace save when she anticipated the servant in rising early, and had an honest scrub at saucepans or fireirons before breakfast.

Then Tetrachord made some adjustments at the keyboardlike row of fretted miniature guitar necks.

While Nic watched and fretted, Bobby Walker tucked his second trap under the stairs to her front door and, after a vigorous shake of his head, walk back to his own home without knocking on her door.

In the fulness of his vanity and wit, Wylo began to make gratuitous fun of Yan-coo, who fretted and fumed and terrified the piccaninnies with still more hideous debils-debils.

The bed of the watercourse was covered with fragments of broken rocks, which had fallen from above, offering so many obstructions to the course of the rapid stream, which vexed and fretted about them,--forming at intervals small waterfalls, pouring over into deep basins, or splashing wildly upon heaps of stones.

It seems a little thing, but it chafed and fretted my already irritated soul till at last I was almost beside myself.

I have made prayer too much of a luxury, and have often inwardly chafed and fretted when the care of my children, at times, made it utterly impossible to leave them for private devotion-when they have been sick, for instance, or in other like emergencies.

When the supper and the wine had sufficiently raised my spirits, I devoted my attention to Bassi's daughter, who let me do what I liked, while her father and mother only laughed, and the silly Harlequin fretted and fumed at not being able to take the same liberties with his Dulcinea.