All 7 Uses

frayed
in
All the Light We Cannot See
(Auto-generated)

Three frayed electrical leads sprout from the top.
p. 32.1 *

frayed = showing wear with threads beginning to separate or hang loose
She has read Around the World in Eighty Days until the Braille is soft and fraying; for this year's birthday, her father has bought her an even fatter book: Dumas's The Three Musketeers.
p. 51.1
That night she and her father wind up the twisting staircase and go to bed side by side on the same lumpy bed in the same sixth-floor bedroom with the fraying silk wallpaper.
p. 129.4
Every morning it's the same: the Americans ever closer, the Germans fraying at the seams.
p. 414.3 *

fraying = becoming emotionally strained
The commandant raises his left arm and yells, "Ten!" and the wind frays the word across the long expanse.†
p. 192.5
On the wall behind her, a painted wisteria vine frays into a tangled modernist spray of color that makes von Rumpel uneasy.†
p. 235.9
It's surely nonsense, yet something hangs inside it, some truth he does not want to allow himself to apprehend, and as she speaks, she ages, silver hair lays down on her head, her collar frays; she becomes an old woman—his understanding of who hovers at the rim of his consciousness.†
p. 450.1

Definitions:

(1) (frayed as in: frayed cloth)
showing wear with threads beginning to separate or hang loose
(2) (frayed as in: frayed nerves)
emotionally strained (worn thin)
(3) (fray as in: into the fray)
a noisy fight, controversial debate, or other exciting situation that usually is not well organized
(4) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)