fringe

noun

1. A decorative border.

   “the fringe of a picture”

   “The walls were hung with blue silk, edged with silver fringe; and the closely-drawn blue velvet curtains swept the ground.”

2. (broadly)A decorative border.

   “He walked up the heath’s western edge, beside a fringe of scrub where hogweed grew in tangles and brambles rose taller than him.”

3. (also, figuratively)A marginal or peripheral part.

   “the confines of grace and the fringes of repentance”

   “Dos Santos, who has often been on the fringes at Spurs since moving from Barcelona, whipped in a fantastic cross that Pavlyuchenko emphatically headed home for his first goal of the season.”

4. A group of people situated on the periphery of a larger community.

   “About an hour later, the two were sitting at a comparatively isolated table in a restaurant called Sickler’s, downtown, a highly favored place among, chiefly, the intellectual fringe of students at the college—the same students, more or less, who, had they been Yale or Harvard men, might rather too casually have steered their dates away from Mory’s or Cronin’s.”

5. (also, attributive)A group of people situated on the periphery of a larger community.

   “a fringe group of the party”

6. The periphery of an area, especially a town or city.

   “He lives on the fringe of London.”

   “Moreover, although a number of lines penetrate to the fringes of the English Lake District, this is the only one which actually passes through it.”

7. (Australia)The periphery of an area, especially a town or city.

   “All the fringe people thought it was such a good house, ingenious in fact, and erected similar makeshift housing for themselves.”

8. (UK)Synonym of bangs: hair hanging over the forehead, especially a hairstyle where it is cut straight across.

   “Her fringe is so long it covers her eyes.”

   “In a few minutes Mrs. Athelny appeared. She had taken her hair out of the curling pins and now wore an elaborate fringe.”

   “Fayne in the photograph had a fringe, hair frizzed over hidden ears, sleeves over-ornate, the whole thing out of keeping.”

   “Ingeborg knew she wasn′t ready for fringes or short hair like some of the women she′d seen, and she hoped her daughter wasn′t either. “No.” Astrid′s tone dismissed Sophie and the fringe as she galloped off to a new topic.”

   “Set against the seductive visual and textual imagery of these soft-focus fantasy worlds, the stock list details offer the reader a very real solution to achieving the look themselves, ‘Hair, including coloured fringes (obtainable from Joseph, £3.50) by Paul Nix’ (Baker 1972a: 68).”

9. A light or dark band formed by the diffraction of light.

   “interference fringe”

10. Non-mainstream theatre.

    “The Fringe”

    “Edinburgh Fringe”

    “Adelaide Fringe”

11. The peristome or fringe-like appendage of the capsules of most mosses.
12. The area around the green.
13. A daypart that precedes or follows prime time.

adj

1. Outside the mainstream.

   “So was the cellist Charlotte Moorman, muse to Nam June Paik and proactivist champion of all things fringe.”

verb

1. (transitive)To decorate with fringe.

   “[Y]onder cloud / That rises upward always higher, / ⁠And onward drags a labouring breast, / ⁠And topples round the dreary west, / A looming bastion fringed with fire.”

   “Presently she saw the King's palace. Pillars of ice held up the roof fringed with icicles, which would have sparkled splendidly if there had been any sun.”

2. (transitive)To serve as a fringe; to border.

   “Purple bonnets fringed soft, pink, querulous faces on pillows in bath chairs.”

   “The Japanese Archipelago, fringing the eastern edge of Asia, has a rich avifauna, including what is probably the rarest bird in the world - the Toki or Japanese Crested Ibis, and one of the most recently discovered birds - the Okinawa Rail.”