Recent Examples on the WebThis accelerated with globalization after the end of the Cold War and the onset of atomization with the arrival of the smartphone (that prodigious generator of status anxiety), leading to more unequal, more polarized, more fretful societies.—Roger Cohen, New York Times, 5 May 2024 As the fretful Moon in your money zone provokes repressive Saturn in your 5th House of Fun, you may be concerned that this effort gets in the way of your ability to enjoy yourself.—Tarot.com, Baltimore Sun, 4 Feb. 2024 In the last year, all of the interest and concern about VR and its cousin, augmented reality, was subsumed by the fretful conversation about generative artificial intelligence, and for good reason.—Ryan Faughnder, Los Angeles Times, 30 Jan. 2024 Within hours of the attacks, fretful voices worried about making a civilizational clash a self-fulfilling reality.—Jordan Michael Smith, The New Republic, 19 Oct. 2023 To be robust but sour, like an alarm clock, is to make a fretful noise.—The New Yorker, 17 Oct. 2023 Some economists in Denmark worry that the country could become too dependent on Novo Nordisk, with fretful comparisons to the fate of the Finnish economy when Nokia lost its dominance in the cellphone industry.—Eshe Nelson, New York Times, 29 Aug. 2023 The Mitnick Affair drove a fretful international conversation not just about hacking, but also about the internet itself.—Alex Traub, New York Times, 20 July 2023 But even without a song to call their own, Milky and Kanagawa have elevated what was once a mere prop in a storybook musical into a three-hanky barnstormer of a character — the cow that rueful Jack of Beanstalk fame (Cole Thompson) is ordered to sell by his eternally fretful mother (Aymee Garcia).—Peter Marks, Washington Post, 25 Aug. 2022
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'fretful.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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