Definition of "frayed" []

• Simple past tense and past participle of fray. (verb)

Wiktionary.org : Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

• "I have never been to the British Museum, so for me its leather chairs still creak under harrumphing old colonels with handlebar moustaches, wheezing tubercular poets in frayed brown sweaters, and Karl Marx."
• "Unspoken, unmentioned, was the reality the that the domestic consensus for the war, so clear in the wake of 9/11, has frayed, is broken, and absent another terrorist tragedy could never be reassembled with the strength it once possessed."
• "It was a place where gray mists hid the tops of low, deep-green mountains, where redbone and bluetick hounds flashed through the pines as they chased possums into the sacks of old men in frayed overalls, where old women in bonnets dipped Bruton snuff and hummed "Faded Love and Winter Roses" as they shelled purple hulls, canned peaches and made biscuits too good for this world."