What is "frayed"

Usage examples of "frayed".

There he was greeted by the parliamentary member, the representatives of the local council, various trembling beadles and burghers, and a squad of shrunken, bemedalled regimental pensioners in their frayed crimson tunics, ready for one final war.

I think I would have preferred to see him in the Dixieland male uniform of choice: a bass-fishing T-shirt and frayed jeans.

He held tight to the frayed rope that stretched down from the forestay sail as the stubby craft pitched, laboring to stay afloat in the heavy seas.

My frowsy friend produced from some interior of his frayed clothing half a loaf of bread, pepper, and salt.

Furtively, she inspected the homeostatic control box of the tractor, and picked at the frayed, partially incinerated insulation of one of its power cables.

Kasane knew that her parents and her grandmother would be asleep on their frayed straw mats in the single room of their tiny house there.

Like every three-by-five card, this card was miscolored and stiff, but its comers were extra frayed, obviously from heavy use.

My father there -- that portly unshaven gent with his thinning hair flying up and his front false tooth out, wearing a food-stained shirt and, at midafternoon, pajama bottoms, with a frayed belt cinched over his potbelly to bolster the elastic waistband.

Steep slopes ringed that water on the near sides, tall warrior pines marching up them to stand in file at the crest like the soldiers for which they were named, the sparse cones of branches at their summits for helms and the curling strips of hard gray bark that frayed from their trunks in ringlike semicircles for mail.

Frayed jean shorts displayed a drool-worthy pair of long legs made all the sexier by a dusting of sandy-brown hair.

Hickson was sewing up the frayed edge of his leather thumbstall which protected his hand when a cannon was swabbed out.

There were other sounds, too, spectral between the clanging of the trams, skirls of music, strands of the same frayed Russian song, flung from at least three directions.

In the backs of the carts the men and women sat on enormous rocking twists of the frayed wire.

Her sense of her body became ever more tentative as her self came uncentered, and her will to live frayed.

A few thousand volts sparked from a concealed laser electrode into my frayed nervous system.