It’s the third week of the quarter, and things are getting busier. By the third week however, most of us feel like sailors who have lost sight of land — i.e., the summer and sanity.

In other words, I bet that some of you are quite frazzled. But what does that mean? And where does this funny little word come from?

“To be worn to a frazzle” is a chiefly American colloquialism originating in the early 1800s, meaning “to wear out, or become unraveled and torn to rags or ribbons,” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary — OED, for short.

This folksy noun and verb is related to the idea of something becoming frayed or “fazzled”; fray shares the same Latin root as friction, fricāre, meaning “to rub,” with “fazzle” coming to us from the Middle English facelyn, meaning “to fray,” from fasel, meaning “frayed edge” (“to fasel out”) from the now-obsolete Old English fæs, referring to a border or fringe.

The earliest reference to a fæs comes to us in a 10th century copy of the Lindisfarne Gospels, a Latin manuscript of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John hand-copied and decorated on the island of Lindisfarne — or the “Holy Island,” so named for its historic monastery — in northeast Great Britain.

Skipping ahead to about 1825, we find our first written use of frazzle in much more modern English, as noted by the OED, in Robert Forby’s Vocabulary of East Anglia, along with the definition, “Frazle, to unravel or rend cloth.” Forby was a Cambridge-educated philologist — a linguistic scholar — priest and tutor who was also a bit of a civic Renaissance man; alas, he died of a fainting fit during a warm bath, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Moving along: The first modern use of the noun form of frazzle can be found in 1865, in William Conant Church’s Ulysses S. Grant and the Period of National Preservation and Reconstruction. Church recounts this line from Gen. John Gordon to Gen. Robert E. Lee:

“Tell General Lee, I have fought my corps to a frazzle.”

I hope I have not frazzled you too much with this anecdote-studded review of frazzle; we have gone from a Holy Island to warm baths to Civil War generals — all in the pursuit of etymology. Until we meet again, feel free to send me your word ideas. Cheers.

Reach columnist Will Mari at features@dailyuw.com