Wrought

The adjective wrought was the regular past participle of the Old English verb wirchen or wurchen, which became 'to work' in Modern English. (The past tense Old English form was wrohte, which developed into wroghte and variants in Middle English; the OE form of the past participle could be geworht (~ Early Modern y-wrought) or wroʒt, and the Middle English wroghte with spelling variants, including the yogh. From the 15th century, the past tense form became, and is now well-established as, worked.)

• Wrought is now only a general adjective meaning 'worked', with an overall meaning of 'made or prepared by human activity' in the senses:
  • in metalwork, 'made by hammering', as opposed to casting;
    • wrought iron, as opposed to cast iron, was a form of iron used earlier where mild steel is the usual current product. It contains some slag hammered into its structure, which makes it malleable and helps to resist rusting.
  • sometimes 'cut from', or otherwise produced from, raw materials, as wrought silk is spun from the natural cocoons, as opposed to 'raw silk', and wrought coal was the substance 'won' from the seam and brought to the surface;
  • crafted, with strong connotations of 'fine work', 'beautiful craftsmanship', in such fields as embroidery, leatherwork and poetry (where "a well-wrought poem" may be felt to be rather affected - but a well-regarded volume (1947) of critical essays by Cleanth Brooks was called The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry).
• Figuratively, wrought was used among sailors to describe sea conditions "Worked up; rough; agitated" Obs[olete] (OED), as in "It is a high wrought flood" (Shakespeare, Othello (1616) II. i. 2, cited OED. The same image is used to describe a mental or emotional state:
  • in the simplest form, of excitement or stimulation, usually with connotations of excess, or nervous energy or over-stimulation. (Someone who is wrought up has reached a stage of nervous tension.) This image is often seen nowadays in the compound overwrought, which originally described people who had been overworked but now is more usually 'agitated', 'extremely nervously worked-up', as may be seen in "The women making such claims were obviously irrational, hysterical, overwrought, not in their right minds" (Family Therapy Networker (1993), cited OED).