Fraught means full of anxiety, or loaded with danger. A fraught silence, fraught with difficulty, things got fraught.
It takes with when the danger is named, and fraught with difficulty is nearly a fixed phrase. On its own it means tense, which is a newer use. The original meaning was simply laden, and it is the same word as freight.
1adjectivefraughtFull of anxiety, or loaded with danger.
“The days before the wedding were fraught, with arguments about every little detail.”
fraught is a state.
Middle English fraught means laden, from a Middle Dutch word for cargo. Freight is the same word.
Proto-Indo-European
*per-
Proto-Germanic
*fraihtiz
Middle Low German
vracht
Middle Dutch
vracht
Middle English
fraught
English, today
fraught
Built from
From Middle English fraught, fraght, freght (“transport of goods or people (usually by water); charge for such transport; facilities for such transport; cargo or passengers of a ship; ballast of a ship; goods in general; (figurative) burden; charge”), from Middle Dutch vracht, vrecht, or Middle Low German vracht, vrecht (“cargo, freight; charge for transport of goods”), from Proto-Germanic fraihtiz, from fra- + Proto-Germanic aihtiz (“acquisition; possessions, property”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European h₂eyḱ- (“to come into possession of, obtain; to own, possess”)). a doublet of freight. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA