n.
WA wra, wraa, wray
'nook, corner, seculed place, passage'
(Modern English wro)cp. OIcel rá, ‘corner, nook’, MSw vraa, Dan vra (Bj. DP regards the word as deriving from OEN) < PGmc *wranxō; there are no exact cognates outside ON, but it is generally connected with PGmc *wrangō (cp. OIcel rǫng ‘rib of a ship’, OE wranga ‘ship’s hold’, MLG wrange ‘wale’, formed on the verb PGmc *wrengan- ‘to wring’). ME spellings in <a> and <o> indicate an early ME /ɑ:/ < ON /ɑ:/, not the /o:/ which would have developed in a native word < PGmc */an/ before /x/. The loss of *-h is not a secure test of loan here, since OE heavy ō-stems would normally have oblique forms with deletion of /x/ between vowels (see Campbell §589(3), Hogg-Fulk §3.88 and note esp. OE slōh ‘mire’, acc./dat. sg. slō) and a stem *wrō could have been generalized across the paradigm.
PGmc Ancestor
*wranxō
Proposed ON Etymon (OIcel representative)
rá, ‘corner, nook’
(ONP rá (3) (sb.))
Other Scandinavian Reflexes
Far vrá, Icel rá, Norw ro, Dan vrå, Sw vrå
OE Cognate
Phonological and morphological markers
ON / ɑ:/ < PGmc */anx/
[ON loss of */x/ finally] (possibly diagnostic)
Summary category
A1bc
MED has a handful of literary occurrences (earliest in Havelok); it is fairly broadly distributed, but with a preponderance of N/EM occurrences. Confined to Sc. and N dial. in later dial. evidence. Chiefly N/EM in place-names (see further MED senses (b) and (c), EPNE, Elliot 1984: 81).
Occurrences in the Gersum Corpus
Gaw 2222; Pe 866; WA 1585, 4190