Fretful means restless and inclined to complain. A fretful baby, a fretful night, fretful with tiredness.
It is used most of small children and of the sleep they prevent, and it suggests low-level unhappiness rather than real distress. The fret in it once meant to gnaw, which is what worry does.
1adjectivefretfulRestless and inclined to complain.
“The baby was fretful all evening and would not settle.”
fretful is a quality.
Fret plus -ful; the older fret meant to gnaw or eat away, from Old English fretan.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁ed-
Proto-Germanic
*fraetaną — to consume, devour, eat up
Proto-West Germanic
*fraetan
Old English
fretan — to eat up, devour; to fret; to break, burst
Middle English
frēten — to eat (at), corrode, destroy, annoy
English
fret
English, today
fretful
Built from
From fret + ful. fret comes from Middle English frēten (“to eat (at), corrode, destroy, annoy”), from Old English fretan (“to eat up, devour; to fret; to break, burst”), from Proto-West Germanic fraetan, from Proto-Germanic fraetaną (“to consume, devour, eat up”), from Proto-Germanic fra- (“for-, prefix meaning ‘completely, fully’”) (from Proto-Indo-European pro- (“forward, toward”)) + etaną (“to eat”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European h₁ed- (“to eat”)). The senses meaning “to chafe, rub” could also be due to sound-association with Anglo-Norman freiter (modern dialectal French fretter), from Vulgar Latin frictāre, frequentative of Latin fricāre, from fricō (“to chafe, rub”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European bʰreyH- (“to cut”); compare Old French froter (modern French frotter). The chief difficulty is the lack of evidence of the Old French word. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA