freten by sowe

Joel S. Berson Berson at ATT.NET
Mon Mar 3 16:38:58 UTC 2008


At 3/2/2008 10:24 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>OED, "fret", v.1:
>1.    a. trans. Chiefly of animals: To eat, devour. Also with up and
>to eat of. Obs.
>        b. transf. To devour, consume, destroy. Obs.

This does not rule out fretting by humans.  And I don't read ME.  Can
someone tell me whether some of the quotations (see links below) are
about humans fretting?  (I surmise that some of them are about humans
being fretten!)

Joel

At 3/2/2008 11:41 PM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>There are a number of example quotations in the on-line Middle English
>Dictionary:
>
>http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/lookup.html
>
>http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=byte&byte=63092228&egdisplay=open&egs=63105220

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