fray

Can be confused: frays, phrase.

Word Story
“I joined the fray, and proceeded to fray my clothes.” What we have here are two completely different words that happen to be spelled (and pronounced) the same way. This is the story of the first fray, a word for a fight, a competition, or a noisy brawl.
This fray was borrowed into English from an Anglo-French word with the various meanings “to disturb,” “to attack,” and also “to frighten.” The past participle of this same word (affrayed, meaning “alarmed”) became, in English, afraid.
While nowadays frays are things that people willingly “enter” or “join” or even “throw themselves into,” early in its history the fear aspect dominated. And so, in the 1300s, one could speak of frayes and dredes (fears and dreads) and in the 1500s, one might find a fray-boggard (fear-goblin) in the garden, a frightening specter better known to us as a scarecrow.

Word Story
This is the story of the second fray, a word that means to cause deterioriation or wear on something, usually material, by rubbing it. Metaphorically, this can apply to less tangible things, such as our nerves or our tempers.
This fray is closely related to the word friction, as both have as a common ancestor the Latin fricāre, meaning “to rub.” It makes sense—given enough friction, things will begin to fray. But language isn’t always so neat. One early sense of fray that existed in the 1400s, but which has since fallen out of use, meant “to bruise” (as in, with our strokes we shall fray him). In a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses dating from the 1500s, this very same sense in a different context is used to mean “deflower” (deprive of virginity). Can we connect the dots from rub to bruise to deflower? Therein lies the rub.